OpenAI Boosts ChatGPT with New Search Engine Features
News Desk
Islamabad: OpenAI announced on Thursday that it has upgraded its ChatGPT generative AI chatbot with search engine capabilities, intensifying its competition against Google, which has long dominated online search.
With this latest update, ChatGPT can now provide fast, real-time answers complete with links to relevant web sources—functionality that previously required users to turn to traditional search engines, according to a blog post from OpenAI.
This significant enhancement allows the AI chatbot to deliver up-to-date information on a variety of topics, including weather forecasts, stock prices, sports scores, and breaking news.
Demonstrations on the OpenAI website showed results that closely resembled those found on Google and Google Maps, as well as the conversational interface of Perplexity, another AI-driven search engine that references sources in its answers.
The new feature offers users the option to receive results by default or manually activate the web search capability by clicking an icon. OpenAI also stated that any website or publisher can opt to appear in ChatGPT’s search results, and the company is actively seeking feedback from content creators to improve the system further.
AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude have faced limitations due to time cutoffs that result in outdated information, a disadvantage compared to Google and Microsoft, which integrate AI responses with web results.
This development raises questions about OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft, a significant investor in the company, which is also working to enhance its search engine with its Copilot AI.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has expressed his ambition to transform the company into a major internet player, recently achieving a remarkable $157 billion valuation in a fundraising round that included investments from Microsoft, SoftBank, and Nvidia.
As OpenAI entices new users with search engine capabilities, it also faces increasing demands on its computational resources, which come at a significant cost.
