OpenAI Launches ChatGPT With Search, Taking Google Head-on

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/10/openai-launches-chatgpt-with-search-taking-google-head-on/

One of the biggest bummers about the modern Internet has been the decline of Google Search. Once an essential part of using the web, it's now a shadow of its former self, full of SEO-fueled junk and AI-generated spam.

On Thursday, OpenAI announced a new feature of ChatGPT that could potentially replace Google Search for some people: an upgraded web search capability for its AI assistant that provides answers with source attribution during conversations.
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Each search result in ChatGPT comes with a citation link, and users can click a "Sources" button beneath responses to view referenced materials in a sidebar that pops up beside the chat history.

The new search system runs on a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o, which OpenAI says it post-trained using synthetic data output from its o1-preview model.
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ChatGPT with Search also helps OpenAI take advantage of its new publishing partnerships and reframe those media relationships into something beyond merely scraping web data to train its AI models, which caused legal trouble in the past.
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As mentioned above, over the past few years, OpenAI has established new partnerships with major news organizations, collaborating with the Associated Press, Axel Springer, Ars Technica parent Conde Nast, Dotdash Meredith, Financial Times, GEDI, Hearst, Le Monde, News Corp, Prisa (El Pais), Reuters, The Atlantic, Time, and Vox Media.
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In a hands-on test of ChatGPT with Search, the new feature seemed to consistently pull relevant links from the web while answering our questions, but it wasn't perfect, returning a few errant sources here and there. It also sometimes provided irrelevant images that were shown beside some search results.
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All these new avenues for ChatGPT to potentially prefer one website, source of information, company, brand, or shop brings up a big question: Will OpenAI offer preferential content placement for media partners or advertisers in the future?
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In the future, OpenAI plans to add to the new search feature with custom answers for shopping and travel-related queries. The company also plans to use OpenAI's o1 series for deeper search capabilities and expand the search experience to Advanced Voice Mode and Canvas features.

The search function launches today for ChatGPT Plus and Team subscribers through chatgpt.com and mobile apps. Enterprise and education users will gain access in the coming weeks, with a broader rollout to free users planned over several months.

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