AI Experts — Even Google’s AI — React To OpenAI’s New Search Feature

The AI ecosphere is abuzz this morning following OpenAI’s announcement on Thursday of its new search feature, which will be directly integrated into its ChatGPT interface for paid users — at least initially.

The company posted the news to its 3.7 million followers on X — formerly known as Twitter — generating nearly 2 million views within hours.

How OpenAI Search Works

In a blog post, the company goes into detail as to how the new features and benefits of this upgrade blends real-time web searching with a natural language interface.

ChatGPT will rely on its AI to decide when to work search into your query based on the nature of the request, or paid subscribers can manually initiate a search by clicking on the “globe” icon in the query box as pictured below.

The company write-up states that access to the functionality will rollout in stages.

“All ChatGPT Plus and Team users, as well as SearchGPT waitlist users, will have access today. Enterprise and Edu users will get access in the next few weeks. We’ll roll out to all Free users over the coming months,” the company stated.

The real-time results provide generative AI responses that are augmented with multiple links, citations and images. These additional outputs help improve the accuracy and reduce AI’s tendency to fabricate facts when it doesn’t know something.

A sample search result is depicted immediately below.

OpenAI’s Media Partners Help Fuel Search Results

ChatGPT search is now enabled to scan blogs, stock tickers, weather sites, social media platforms as well as media outlets for which it has secured licensing agreements.

“We collaborated extensively with the news industry and carefully listened to feedback from our global publisher partners, including Associated Press, Axel Springer, Condé Nast, Dotdash Meredith, Financial Times, GEDI, Hearst, Le Monde, News Corp, Prisa (El País), Reuters, The Atlantic, Time, and Vox Media. Any website or publisher can choose to appear⁠ in ChatGPT search,” the corporate blog post read.

AI Experts React To OpenAI’s Search

Conor Grennan is Chief AI Architect at NYU Stern School of Business as well as CEO and founder of AI consultancy, AI Mindset. In an email exchange, he gave the OpenAI team high marks for the search model and wrote that Google search is no longer the standard.

“Between Perplexity and Google AI overviews, the new standard is to search multiple websites and give you an answer in natural language. ChatGPT search is blazing fast and borrows from the Perplexity-style interface, which is great,” Grennan wrote.

“It’s also unique in that if you ask it a normal ChatGPT query – i.e., help me create a workshop to teach AI — and press “search,” it will give you the answer, but it will cite its sources for how it came up with that. In other words, it will tell you where it got its ideas. It’s as if you’re reading ChatGPT’s mind,” he explained.

“Where ChatGPT has fallen down in the early days is that it sometimes has trouble correcting its errors. I flagged some out-of-date information, but it just continued to insist it was correct. In fairness, these issues will likely be corrected,” Grennan added.

Sabrina Ramonov is an AI wunderkind who began her career as a software engineer before launching her own AI-powered speech recognition company that she sold to Pegasystems for $10 million at 30 years old. She has 100,000 social media followers and just launched a new multi-purpose content generation app Blotato. She wrote via messenger text that overall, she liked what she saw from OpenAI search.

“I love the sources cited throughout ChatGPT search’s response, but I still prefer Perplexity’s ability to focus on particular sources, for example, narrowing my query to search social platforms or video content,” she explained.

A few additional factoids from a pair of other AI influencers — one said OpenAI worked well in Spanish while another praised the lack of sponsored ads at the top of search results. However both agreed with Ramonov that the user experience for Perplexity’s AI search was better.

Experts Explain Why They Think OpenAI Launched Search

Grennan and Ramonov had different views as to what may have prompted OpenAI to push into the expensive arena of internet search. Ramonov explained that the company may have wanted to tackle several common challenges that plague large language models in one fell swoop.

“LLM hallucinations and “black-box” lack of transparency are massive concerns. By citing sources throughout its answers, it’s much easier for users to dive deeper and confirm information,” she wrote.

Grennan opened the AI aperture a bit more, stating this was a strategic play necessary for OpenAI’s future position within the marketplace and mindshare of potential users.

“This is all about adoption of a product. The vast percentage of the population only use LLMs like ChatGPT occasionally — even in knowledge management roles. But everyone — billions of people — are using internet search tools. And Google has maintained a stranglehold on that market,” he wrote.

“OpenAI seems to realize that if the population isn’t coming to them in the numbers they want, they will go to where the population is, and what it knows — internet search, done better than Google,” noted Grennan.

AI Experts Views If OpenAI’s Tool Is a Google Search Killer

Ramonov wrote from her personal experience that she prefers generative AI search options to Google.

“My use of Google search has steadily declined over the past few years, as I’ve relied more and more on ChatGPT and Perplexity. But I think Google search will evolve to include more interactive, generative AI features,” she concluded.

Grennan noted that ChatGPT won’t be able stop Google search on its own. Yet he ironically believes Google will ultimately have to “kill” the current model of Google search.

“ChatGPT Search will not be a Google search killer but not because of its quality. It simply can’t compete with the sheer distribution of Google and the comfort people have with using Google. Traditional Google search will be killed off by Google – they have to compete with ChatGPT search and Perplexity, and they’ve seen the writing on the wall – this is how people want to search the internet now,” Grennan shared.

“The problem is that it is killing off Google’s big revenue driver – ads. Google had to make a choice – to maintain the old way and know they’ll have money pouring in for the foreseeable future with ads, or adapt now and try to find another way forward to keep up with the rapid pace of generative AI,” he concluded.

Google’s Gemini AI Also Weighs In On OpenAI Search

While human experts are great, you can’t help but wonder what the main competitor — Google’s Gemini AI — has to say about OpenAI search. Below is the prompt I crafted to find out.

Gemini then proceeded to provide the following unedited answers to each of the first three questions it answered:

Q1. What’s good and what’s bad about the new AI search engine?

A1. Here’s what I found on the web about the new AI search engine launched by OpenAI:

• Good things:
• Provides summaries of information directly in the chat interface, saving users time and effort.
• Integrates search with a conversational interface, making information discovery more interactive.
• Partners with news outlets to ensure users get high-quality information.
• Provides inline citations for sources, allowing users to verify the credibility of information.
• Bad things:
• Still under development, and may not be as comprehensive or accurate as Google Search.
• Relies on third-party search providers, potentially limiting its control over data and privacy.
• Requires a paid subscription for full access, which could limit its user base.

Q2. Why do you think OpenAI launched this particular product?

A2. Here’s what some people say about why OpenAI might have launched this product:

• OpenAI aims to provide a more user-friendly and interactive search experience than traditional search engines.
• This could be a strategic move to compete with Google in the search market.
• It might be part of a larger plan to develop AI-powered tools that can access and process information more effectively.

Q3. Do you think it’s a Google “search killer” — why or why not?

A3. It’s too early to say definitively whether ChatGPT Search is a “Google Search killer.” Google Search is a well-established product with a massive user base and sophisticated algorithms. However, ChatGPT Search offers a unique user experience that could appeal to some users. Whether it can gain widespread adoption remains to be seen.

At the end of the matter, competition is good for markets and OpenAI search is another option within that space, which is good for consumers.