Sam Altman’s OpenAI on Thursday launched a test version of its long-awaited AI search engine, directly challenging Google’s dominance of the online search market.
The tool, called “SearchGPT,” cites information pulled from websites and news publishers, including OpenAI content partners such as News Corp, the parent company of The Washington Post, and The Atlantic, to provide “fast, timely answers with clear, relevant sources.”
The search tool is designed to be more conversational and interactive than traditional search engines.
The user enters an initial prompt, such as a search for “music festivals in Boone, North Carolina in August.”
From there, you can ask follow-up questions, such as whether a particular concert venue is family-friendly, and SearchGPT will preserve the context of the conversation to narrow down the best answers.
OpenAI said in a blog post that the tool is currently “being tested by a small number of users and publishers to obtain feedback.”
It will eventually be integrated into ChatGPT, which topped 100 million weekly users last fall. For now, users who want to try the tool are instructed to join a waitlist.
“Sam and the incredibly talented team at OpenAI instinctively understand that for AI-powered search to be effective, it must be based on the highest quality, most reliable information from trusted sources,” News Corp CEO Robert Thomson said in a statement.
“For heaven to be balanced, the relationship between technology and content must be symbiotic and provenance must be protected,” Thomson added.
The launch of OpenAI is a new headache for Google, which is awaiting a federal court ruling this fall on a landmark Department of Justice antitrust lawsuit alleging a monopoly in the online search market.
Following the OpenAI announcement, shares of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, plummeted by nearly 2%.
OpenAI said information pulled from specific news outlets and publishers is prominently cited with “clear, in-line, named attribution” and hyperlinks so “users know where the information came from and can immediately see more results.”
“We’re committed to a vibrant ecosystem of publishers and creators,” OpenAI added. “We want to empower users to discover publisher sites and experiences while providing more choice in search.”
OpenAI did not provide a timeline for the full rollout of SearchGPT, though it added that publishers who decide to opt out of having their work used to train OpenAI models may still appear in SearchGPT results.
Earlier this month, News Corp’s Thompson called OpenAI’s content licensing agreement a “critical moment in recalibrating the world of search” that has long been dominated by Google.
In addition to its deals with News Corp and The Atlantic, OpenAI has partnerships with The Associated Press, Politico parent company Axel Springer, Dotdash Meredith, and a variety of other news publishers.
At the same time, OpenAI was sued by the New York Times, which claimed copyright infringement after the AI leader used its articles without permission.
OpenAI has denied any wrongdoing.
Google boasts roughly 90% market share in online searches, dwarfing current rivals such as Microsoft and DuckDuckGo.
The Justice Department’s federal antitrust lawsuit against Google alleges that the company pays billions of dollars each year to Apple, AT&T and other companies to make its search engine the default setting on most smartphones.
Google has faced heavy criticism for taking copyrighted content from publishers without proper credit or permission, and using that information to train its AI models.
In June, Google rolled out a controversial search feature called “AI Summary,” which pushes auto-generated summaries to the top of search results, substituting traditional links from publishers and news outlets.
The launch of “AI Overview” was a disastrous one: Google was widely mocked for the bizarre results the tool produced, such as telling readers to add glue to pizza or eat a rock.
Daniel Coffey, CEO of the News Media Alliance, a nonprofit group that represents more than 2,200 publishers, including The Washington Post, called the feature a “trick to innovation” that would have a “devastating impact on our traffic.”
Meanwhile, Perplexity, a $1 billion Amazon-backed startup that’s developing an AI-powered search engine, was recently slammed by Forbes magazine for citing an exclusive article without proper credit or permission.
Forbes then threatened legal action against Perplexity.
