SAN FRANCISCO: OpenAI on Monday said it is making ChatGPT-powered Internet search available to all users, escalating its threat to Google’s dominance.
The San Francisco-based tech firm had beefed up its ChatGPT generative AI chatbot with search engine capabilities in late October, but made the feature available only to paying subscribers.
The newly public feature enables users to receive “fast, timely answers” with links to relevant web sources — information that previously required using a traditional search engine, the company said.
The upgrade to ChatGPT enables the AI chatbot to provide real-time information from across the web.
“We’re bringing search to all logged-in free users of ChatGPT,” OpenAI chief product officer Kevin Weil said in a video posted at YouTube.
“That means it’ll be available globally on every platform where you use ChatGPT.”
Examples of the new interface demonstrated by OpenAI resembled search results provided by Google and Google Maps, though without the clutter of advertising.
They also appeared similarly to the interface of Perplexity, another AI-powered search engine that offers a more conversational version of Google by featuring the sources it referenced in the answer.
“We’re really just making the ChatGPT experience that you know better with up-to-date information from the web,” ChatGPT Search product lead Adam Fry said in the video.
“We’re rolling this out to hundreds of millions of users, starting today.”
Rather than 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 have been limited by time cutoffs, so the answers they provided were not up-to-date.
In contrast, Google and Microsoft both combine AI-generated answers with web results.
The addition of online search to ChatGPT will raise more questions about the startup’s link to Microsoft, a major OpenAI investor, which is also trying to expand the reach of its Bing search engine against Google.
OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman has set his company on a path to become an Internet powerhouse.
He successfully catapulted the company to a staggering $157 billion valuation in a recent round of fundraising 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.
ChatGPT search opens to all users in challenge to Google
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ChatGPT search opens to all users in challenge to Google
- OpenAI has integrated search directly into ChatGPT
Sweden wants to strip organized crime leaders of citizenship
- A bill submitted to parliament on Friday includes a proposal that would allow revoking passports of double citizenship holders convicted of “crimes”
STOCKHOLM: The Swedish government on Friday proposed changes to the constitution that would allow revoking the citizenship of some criminal gang leaders, as part of its work to combat widespread organized crime.
In January, a cross-party parliamentary committee proposed constitutional changes to allow stripping the passports of people with dual nationality convicted of espionage or treason, but stopped short of suggestions targeting organized crime.
“The government has chosen to go further than the committee’s proposal precisely to make it possible to also revoke citizenship from, for example, gang leaders who are guilty of very, very serious harm to society,” Justice Minister Gunnar Strommer told a press conference.
He said a bill submitted to parliament on Friday includes a proposal that would allow revoking passports of double citizenship holders convicted of “crimes that gravely affect vital national interests” such as serious gang crime.
Sweden has been plagued by organized crime-related violence for well over a decade.
The government and its backers, the far-right and anti-immigration Sweden Democrats, won the 2022 election on a promise to reduce immigration and gang crime, which they say are linked. New general elections are due in 2026.
To change the Swedish constitution, the proposals need to pass a vote in parliament with a simple majority, followed by a general election and then a second Riksdag vote.
Strommer said he aims for the proposed changes to the constitution to enter into force at the start of 2027.
