OpenAI just launched its AI search update for ChatGPT. Three months after the company’s initial announcement of a SearchGPT prototype, OpenAI’s vision for the future of AI search is now available to the public.
“We’re focused on making ChatGPT the best place to answer any question, including live information from the web,” says Adam Fry, the product lead for search on ChatGPT. Referred to by Fry now as “ChatGPT search” rather than “SearchGPT,” the feature enters an increasingly crowded and contentious field of AI search options for users—with competition from smaller startups, like Perplexity, as well as tech giants, like Google with its AI Overview search results. So far in 2024, journalists have criticized both Google and Perplexity’s implementations of AI search for improperly copying aspects of original work and hallucinating fake information.
In the lead up ChatGPT’s search upgrade, OpenAI reached content licensing deals with multiple online publishers, like The Atlantic, Vox Media, and Condé Nast, which is the parent company of this very publication. These deals allow the AI startup to use publishers’ work to train its systems, in exchange for a fee. (Similar to the firewall between advertising and editorial teams, business deals have no influence over WIRED’s coverage.)
I was quite anxious about the ramifications when I first saw my writing for WIRED referenced by ChatGPT back in 2023. After a few hours of testing a pre-launch version of ChatGPT’s new AI search, it’s clear to me that OpenAI has made significant progress since its initial, messy foray into web browsing, with more interactive elements and clearer attribution of its sources. I could see a subset of early adopters really latching on to the new ChatGPT search.
Taking that into account, the current product needs improvements before it’s able to truly compete with the dominance of Google for essential search experiences, like online shopping. ChatGPT also makes some of the same mistakes as other AI search tools, like hallucinating and citing incorrect information. Curious about trying out the update for yourself? Here’s how to use it and some examples from my initial experiences.
How to Use ChatGPT’s Search Tool
To immediately try out this update, you do need to pay for one of OpenAI’s subscriptions. If you have the ChatGPT Plus plan for $20 a month or ChatGPT Teams through work, the new search experience should now be available. OpenAI will likely roll this out to users who have Enterprise and Edu plans sometime later in November. Free users will have to wait the longest, likely until early next year.
ChatGPT search is powered by a custom version of GPT-4o, OpenAI’s most recent generative model. It’s available to users through the ChatGPT website, mobile app (Android, Apple), and web app (Mac, Windows). While this is a fairly global rollout, users in certain areas, like the European Union, are not yet able to use the AI search feature.
