OpenAI is introducing a ChatGPT-driven search engine, positioning the AI company to potentially rival Google and influence the flow of internet users searching for news, sports updates, and other real-time information.

The San Francisco-based company announced on Thursday that it will initially roll out the search feature for paid ChatGPT subscribers, with plans to extend it to all users in the future. A preview version was launched in July for a limited group of users and media publishers.

The original ChatGPT model, which debuted in 2022, was trained on extensive datasets from online text but lacked the ability to answer questions about recent events not covered in its training data.
 

In May, Google revamped its search platform by introducing AI-generated summaries at the top of search results, aiming to quickly address user queries without requiring users to visit additional sites. However, after a year of testing with a select group, Google's AI summaries have still occasionally presented inaccuracies, highlighting the risks associated with relying on AI chatbots prone to "hallucinations" or misinformation.

The shift toward using AI chatbots to deliver news from established journalistic sources has raised concerns among media organizations. The New York Times, among other outlets, has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against OpenAI and its partner Microsoft. In a related development, News Corp., publisher of The Wall Street Journal and New York Post, also took legal action earlier in October against the AI search engine Perplexity.

OpenAI mentioned in a Thursday blog post that its new search engine was developed with assistance from news partners, including The Associated Press and News Corp. The engine will feature links to sources, such as news articles and blog entries. However, it remains unclear whether these links will directly lead to the original sources of the information provided by the chatbot.