OpenAI have announced a major enhancement to ChatGPT's search functionality, allowing users to access real-time information including sports scores, news, stock quotes, and weather updates directly through the chatbot interface. The new feature combines natural language interaction with web search capabilities, eliminating the need for users to switch to traditional search engines.
"ChatGPT search promises to better highlight and attribute information from trustworthy news sources, benefiting audiences while expanding the reach of publishers like ourselves who produce premium journalism," Pam Wasserstein, President of Vox Media, said in the announcement blog post.
The upgraded service will be immediately available to ChatGPT Plus and Team users, with Enterprise and Education users gaining access in the coming weeks. Free users will receive the feature over the next several months.
OpenAI has partnered with major news organisations and data providers to enhance the service's capabilities. The company's collaborators include Associated Press, Axel Springer, Condé Nast, Financial Times, Reuters, and several other prominent media outlets. "We are convinced that AI search will be, in a near future and for the next generations, a primary way to access information," Louis Dreyfus, CEO & Publisher of Le Monde, noted in the announcement.
The new search functionality is powered by a fine-tuned version of GPT-4, incorporating novel synthetic data generation techniques. Users can activate web searches either automatically based on their queries or manually through a web search icon. Each response includes source attribution with clickable links to original content.