“We are so back,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a tweet after the announcement.
OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Amazon and Meta have been scrambling over each other to announce updates and new features to their generative AI products over the last several weeks. Many of the new tools are still making mistakes, showing the pressure the companies are under and their need to get people to use the tools to generate new data and improve their performance. OpenAI’s latest announcement came on the same day that Meta announced a new chatbot of its own that could also search the web using Bing.
Previously, paying ChatGPT users could connect browser “plug-ins” developed by other companies to get the bot to search the web. But Wednesday’s update puts the ability to search directly in the core ChatGPT product, potentially expanding its use to many more people. Some users also had access to the web search tool if they were in a special test program run by OpenAI.
Microsoft was the first to launch a chatbot connected to the web, with its Bing AI tool in February. Bing uses OpenAI’s technology, thanks to a multibillion-dollar deal the two companies signed. Google put out its Bard chatbot in March, and put a chatbot feature at the top of search results for some users as well.
OpenAI has been quickly developing its own consumer-facing tools, upgrading ChatGPT with the ability to interpret images and respond with a spoken voice rather than just text, earlier this week.
Nitasha Tiku contributed to this report.