Artificial-intelligence powerhouse OpenAI announced a major overhaul of ChatGPT that enables the chatbot to search the web and provide answers based on what it finds.

The upgrade transforms the experience of using the popular chatbot. It brings OpenAI into more direct competition with Google, offering an alternative way to find and consume information online.

Beginning Thursday, paying subscribers to ChatGPT will be able to activate a mode that has the AI tool respond to queries by searching the web for the latest information and summarizing what it finds – instead of offering an answer based on the potentially stale data used to create the chatbot.

The search functionality is powered by the Bing search engine of OpenAI’s backer Microsoft. It also draws on articles from publishers the AI developer has signed deals with, such as Wall Street Journal owner News Corp. and the Associated Press.

The new capability makes ChatGPT more similar to a conventional search engine and potentially a more potent challenger to Google and other rivals large and small.

Google added AI-generated summaries with citations to its conventional search results this year in response to growing competition from chatbots. Start-up Perplexity offers a similar AI-enhanced search engine and has received more than $400 million in funding, according to venture capital research firm Pitchbook.

The changes will make ChatGPT more useful and accurate, Varun Shetty, OpenAI’s head of media partnerships, said in an interview. “We think it improves relevancy and decreases hallucinations, because of the ability to go out to the web.”

In addition to helping users find useful information, chatbots and AI search engines are beginning to radically change online economics. For more than a decade Google has been the primary gateway to the web, making news media, bloggers and other publishers dependent on traffic from people clicking through from search results to sell ads or subscriptions.

AI search tools from Google, OpenAI and others that summarize webpages and answer questions directly can help people find information without clicking through to another website. That’s caused rising concern among publishers who fear they will be put out of business by tech companies.

Some publishers accuse AI developers of unfairly copying and plagiarizing their content to build the AI tools upending their industry. Some news organizations have sued OpenAI, alleging copyright infringement.

ChatGPT’s search overhaul will be a test for how AI search engines can impact the publishing industry.

Queries that trigger the web search feature will offer paragraphs of AI-generated text followed by links to the website that the content was summarized from.

Shetty said that ChatGPT’s algorithms might understand the content of articles from OpenAI partners better because they get a direct feed from those publishers, but that news organizations that have signed deals do not get preference in results. Nor are those companies lowering their paywalls to people who land on their site from an OpenAI link, Shetty said.

He said people who use the new search capability will probably still end up spending time on publisher websites. “We think they’ll be curious and want to click off and learn more,” Shetty said.

ChatGPT’s surging popularity after its debut in November 2022 led many tech investors to reason that many people would stop using Google search and instead get direct answers from AI helpers. Google responded by accelerating its own AI chatbot development and this summer putting AI answers at the top of search results.

As of this week, more than 1 billion people around the world see those AI answers on Google results, chief executive Sundar Pichai said Tuesday during a conference call to discuss the company’s quarterly earnings. Though OpenAI has said that about 250 million people turn to ChatGPT each week, Google remains the dominant way people find information online.

Paying users of ChatGPT will have access to the new search function during the Nov. 5 presidential election and in the days after, a period that disinformation researchers say will see lies and political falsehoods flood the web.

OpenAI’s search tool will direct election-related queries to sources such as the Associated Press and Reuters, Shetty said. “What we’ve tried to do is prioritize and elevate the highest quality and authoritative sources we have.”

(c) Washington Post