How ChatGPT Search can reshuffle the AI landscape

ChatGPT can now search the web when generating its responses. This will have implications for OpenAI and other AI companies.

ChatGPT search (source: OpenAI blog)

OpenAI has just released the long-awaited search feature for ChatGPT, which enables the language model to integrate web search results into its answers. The feature will make the user experience much more fluid and make you less reliant on switching between ChatGPT and a search engine.

According to the OpenAI blog, ChatGPT Search uses a special version of GPT-4o, “post-trained using novel synthetic data generation techniques, including distilling outputs from OpenAI o1-preview.” OpenAI’s o1 model uses extra inference-time compute to provide better results on advanced reasoning problems. There has been discussion about o1 outputs being used to train future models. It will be interesting to see o1 distillation in action.

OpenAI will be competing with Bing and Perplexity, which use LLM-powered search. Google Search is also experimenting with LLM results. In a fashion, all leading AI companies are converging on the same set of features and their interfaces are becoming very similar. This is further indication of the commoditization of the AI space.

Given OpenAI’s vast user base and financial resources, this could turn out to be a Perplexity killer unless the latter continues to innovate and find new ways to keep itself relevant. (I carried out my classic multi-hop search on ChatGPT Search, which is to ask something like this: “When was the last time that Steve Young and Jerry Rice played on the same team?” This is a question that requires the model to retrieve different bits of information and reason over their temporal relationships. ChatGPT got it right, though it didn’t provide a relevant source that contained the information. Perplexity didn’t provide the right answer but provided good sources. When I complemented the prompt with “Explain your reasoning process,” both provided the right answer and good sources.)

ChatGPT Search can also complicate OpenAI’s relationship with Microsoft, its main financial backer. OpenAI’s earlier release of the native ChatGPT app for Windows eats into Microsoft’s Copilot products. The new ChatGPT Search feature will hamper Microsoft’s efforts to expand the reach of its Bing Search engine. 

At the same time, Microsoft is gradually reducing its dependence on OpenAI. Just recently, GitHub Copilot, which was previously exclusively powered by OpenAI models, added support for models from Anthropic and Google. Rumors indicate that the amicable partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft might be coming to an end as the AI lab pushes toward becoming a full for-profit company. 

Both companies will need to hedge their bets against each other and plan for a potential fallout of their relationship.