SearchGPT
Day 212 / 366
So it seems like ChatGPT has come out with another one of their product “demos”. This time it is an experimental product known as SearchGPT — a tool that combines web search with LLMs.
https://openai.com/index/searchgpt-prototype/
The idea behind this is that it will help you save time with your searches. The conventional way of finding something on the internet is to go to a search engine like Google, type in your query, go through the various websites that appear in the search results, and understand their content to get to the answer you need.
AI search will automate a lot of this for you. AI agents will search the web and grab relevant info from the search results. After that another LLM will use all the compiled data to get an answer for you.
While this sounds cool, it’s not anything new. Perplexity is another AI search tool that has been out for more than a year now, and behind the scenes, it uses GPT APIs. So this seems like OpenAI’s attempt to kill one of their competitors.
Even the interface they show in the demo looks similar to Perplexity.
Regardless of whether this idea is new or not, the issue is still that this is yet another demo. Like all the other things that OpenAI came out with after GPT-4, all of them have been demos that never got released for the general public. And moreover, even in the curated and edited demo video, people found that the tool gave wrong answers!
Overall, this one was a miss from OpenAI