The Banking Executive Magazine - October Issue

ISSUE 189 OCTOBER 2024 the BANKING EXECUTIVE 39 FinTech and AI Chornicle OpenAI on Thursday beefed up its ChatGPT generative AI chatbot with search engine capabilities, as the startup takes on Google's decades- long dominance of web search. The upgrade enables users to receive "fast, timely answers" with links to relevant web sources -- information that previously required using a tra- ditional search engine, the company said. The significant upgrade to ChatGPT enables the AI chatbot to provide real-time information from across the web. ChatGPT's homepage can now also offer direct tabs to sourced material on topics ranging from weather fore- casts and stock prices to sports scores and breaking news, the company said. These would link to news and data from providers that have signed con- tent deals with OpenAI, including France's Le Monde, Germany's Axel Springer and the UK's Financial Times. Examples of the new interface shown on the OpenAI website closely re- sembled search results on Google and Google Maps, though without the clutter of advertising. They also resembled the interface of Perplexity, another AI-powered search engine that offers a more con- versational version of Google with sources referenced in the answer. Both OpenAI and Perplexity are fac- ing lawsuits from the New York Times for scraping or linking to copy- righted content without permission. Rather than launching a separate product, OpenAI has integrated search directly into ChatGPT for pay- ing subscribers, though this will be expanded to users that use the free version of the chatbot. Users can enable the search feature by default or activate it manually via a web search icon. The company added that any web- site or publisher can opt-in to appear in ChatGPT's search results, with OpenAI actively seeking feedback from content creators to refine the system further. Since their launch, data on AI chat- bots like ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude have been limited by time cutoffs, so the answers provided were not up to date. This has been seen as a weakness of AI chatbots, especially at OpenAI, which does not have a stand-alone search engine providing more timely data. In contrast, Google and Mi- crosoft both combine AI answers with web results. For now, the feature would not in- clude advertising, allowing ChatGPT to offer much cleaner results than Google. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote Thursday on X that search is his "fa- vorite feature we have launched" on ChatGPT since the bot's debut in 2022. "I find it to be a way faster/easier way to get the information I'm looking for," Altman added on Reddit. The launch 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 Altman has set his company on a path to become an internet power- house. He successfully catapulted the com- pany to a staggering $157 billion val- uation in a recent round of fundraising that included Microsoft, Tokyo-based conglomerate SoftBank and AI chipmaker Nvidia as in- vestors. Enticing new users with search en- gine capabilities will increase the company's computing needs and costs, which are enormous. OPEN AI RELEASES CHATGPT SEARCH ENGINE, TAKING ON GOOGLE