ChatGPT will now work as a search engine as OpenAI partners with some news outlets

By The Associated Press

FILE - The OpenAI logo appears on a mobile phone in front of a computer screen with random binary data, March 9, 2023, in Boston. (AP Photo/Michael Dwyer, File)[ASSOCIATED PRESS/Michael Dwyer]

SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — OpenAI is launching a ChatGPT-powered search engine that could put the artificial intelligence company in direct competition with Google and affect the flow of internet traffic seeking news, sports scores and other timely information.

San Francisco-based OpenAI said Thursday it is releasing a search feature to paid users of ChatGPT but will eventually expand it to all ChatGPT users. It released a preview version in July to a small group of users and publishers.

The original version of ChatGPT, released in 2022, was trained on huge troves of online texts but couldn’t respond to questions about up-to-date events not in its training data.

Google upended its search engine in May with AI-generated written summaries now frequently appearing at the top of search results. The summaries aim to quickly answer a user’s search query so that they don’t necessarily need to click a link and visit another website for more information.

Google’s makeover came after a year of testing with a small group of users but usage still resulted in falsehoods showing the risks of ceding the search for information to AI chatbots prone to making errors known as hallucinations.

A pivot by AI companies to have their chatbots deliver news gathered by professional journalists has alarmed some news media organizations. The New York Times is among several news outlets that have sued OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft for copyright infringement. Wall Street Journal and New York Post publisher News Corp sued another AI search engine, Perplexity, earlier in October.

OpenAI said in a blog post Thursday that its new search engine was built with help from news partners, which include The Associated Press and News Corp. It will include links to sources, such as news and blog posts, the company said. It was not immediately clear whether the links would correspond to the original source of the information presented by the chatbot.

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The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of AP’s text archives.