Anyone with a ChatGPT account can now use it to search the Internet. OpenAI announced on Monday, December 16 that access to ChatGPT search is available to all users through the mobile app and the desktop version of the AI platform. Previously, only users subscribing to ChatGPT Plus or its Team plan could use the AI-powered search function which was initially called SearchGPT.
Users will also be able to make ChatGPT Search the default search engine within their web browser of choice. OpenAI is also working on its own web browser to take on Google Chrome.
“We’re also adding Maps to ChatGPT in our mobile apps, so you can find and chat with up-to-date information about local restaurants and businesses,” the company said in a post on X. There will also be an advanced voice mode. In the next week ChatGPT integrated with search, it was added.
Monday’s announcement is part of OpenAI’s “12 Days” Ship-mas program, during which the company introduced several new products, such as its text-to-video generator Sora and a $200-a-month subscription package called ChatGPT Pro. There are still four days left for the announcement by OpenAI.
While SearchGPT was initially billed as a separate platform, OpenAI decided to build AI-powered search functionality into ChatGPT, which is easily one of its most popular AI products with over 300 million weekly users.
Over the past few months, OpenAI has struck several content licensing deals with major news publishers such as the Associated Press, Reuters, and Condé Nast primarily to train its AI search engine on data from these publications. As a result, ChatGPT search primarily cites links to these publications in search results that are pulled and displayed to users.
However, the ability of ChatGPT searches to attribute sources has recently been called into question. A study by Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism copied and pasted 200 quotes from articles posted by a mix of 20 publishers into ChatGPT search and asked the platform to provide the publication’s name, publication date, and URL. ChatGPT search failed to provide these results correctly 153 times, according to the researchers.
“We observed a spectrum of accuracy in the responses: some responses were completely accurate (that is, the publisher, date, and URL of the block quote we shared were correctly returned), many were completely incorrect, and some fell somewhere in between,” The Reading Study .
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