OpenAI said Monday it is making its ChatGPT-powered Internet search available to all users, escalating the threat to Google's dominance.
The San Francisco-based tech company had expanded its generative AI chatbot ChatGPT with search engine capabilities in late October, but made the feature available only to paying subscribers.
The new public feature will allow users to receive “fast, timely responses” with links to relevant web resources – information that previously would have been required through a traditional search engine, the company said.
The upgrade to ChatGPT allows the AI chatbot to provide real-time information from across the internet.
“We're bringing search to all logged-in free users of ChatGPT,” OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil said in a video on YouTube.
“That means it will be available worldwide on every platform where you use ChatGPT.”
Examples of the new interface demonstrated by OpenAI looked similar to Google search results and Google Maps, but without the clutter of ads.
They also resembled the interface of Perplexity, another AI-powered search engine that offers a more conversational version of Google by listing the sources referenced in the response.
“We're really just making the ChatGPT experience you know better with up-to-date information from the web,” Adam Fry, product leader of ChatGPT Search, said in the video.
“We're rolling this out to hundreds of millions of users starting today.”
Instead of launching a separate product, OpenAI has integrated search directly into ChatGPT.
Users can enable the search feature by default or activate it manually via a web search icon.
Since their launch, data on AI chatbots like ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude has been limited by time limits, so the answers they provided were not up to date.
Google and Microsoft, on the other hand, combine AI-generated answers with web results.
The addition of online search to ChatGPT will raise more questions about the startup's link with Microsoft, a major OpenAI investor, which is also trying to expand the reach of its Bing search engine against Google.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has put his company on track to become an Internet powerhouse.
He successfully catapulted the company to a stunning valuation of $157 billion in a recent fundraising round that included Microsoft, Tokyo-based conglomerate SoftBank and AI chipmaker Nvidia as investors.
Enticing new users with search engine capabilities will increase the company's computing needs and costs, which are enormous.
(This story has not been edited by Our staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)