ChatGPT, the best-known generative artificial intelligence (AI) platform, can now serve as a free search engine for its hundreds of thousands of users and therefore places itself in direct competition with Google.
OpenAI presented this extension at the end of October, less than two years after the launch of ChatGPT, but it was reserved for paying subscribers to the service.
All you now need is an account, even a free one, to ask ChatGPT questions about recent news or upcoming events, for example, and receive a response written with links to websites.
The addition of this feature “gives ChatGPT the ability to access information in real time, and, of course, search for answers on the Internet,” explained Kevin Weil, director of product at OpenAI, in a video put online Monday.
The application is therefore no longer limited to its immense mass of data accumulated before a past date.
It can also display answers on a map, like Google Maps, the industry’s dominant service.
And the oral conversation mode with ChatGPT can also draw its answers from the Internet, for paying users.
In response to the spectacular growth of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google, Meta (Facebook, Instagram) and other technology giants have released similar services in 2023 and 2024, capable of producing text and images on a simple query in everyday language .
Google’s assistant, Gemini, already had access to the Internet.
But the world’s number one online advertising company has also added generative AI to its search engine, which now often answers questions with “AI Overviews”, i.e. responses written, before traditional links, to the great dismay of many website editors.
On the side of start-upPerplexity, a neighbor of OpenAI in San Francisco, combines an AI assistant and a search engine.
Since Google became synonymous with online search, a very lucrative business thanks to associated advertising technologies, its dominance has never really been challenged.
Microsoft, OpenAI’s main investor, was the first to integrate generative AI into an existing search engine, Bing, as early as February 2023, in an effort to finally bring its service to the surface.
Google remains largely in the lead, but the threats are growing.
On the legal front, the Californian group was found guilty of anti-competitive practices in online search and the American Department of Justice recommended the sale of its Chrome Internet browser to limit its competitive advantage.
The federal judge in Washington handling the case is expected to rule on Google’s sentence next year.
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