Back in February, The Information reported that OpenAI may be entering the internet search business. This would reportedly be powered, at least partially, by Microsoft’s Bing. While recent developments have not confirmed the latter claim, the ChatGPT-powered internet may begin rolling out next week.
Reddit user u/halfstar has shared that a search.chatgpt.com domain and SSL cert has been created. Separately, an account on X, previously Twitter, owned by a host of The Neuron podcast about AI, has mentioned the same domain with the aforementioned 9 May date. Going to said URL right now doesn’t result in a generic “404 not found” error, for what it’s worth.
As mentioned before, ChatGPT’s ability to pull information from the internet to be included in response to prompts is already partly powered by Bing. With that in mind, it makes sense that the OpenAI search engine will be doing the same. Worth mentioning though that the previous report pegged the effort as being in its early stages, so taking under three months feels like a pretty speedy development.
All that being said, it still remains to be seen what this OpenAI ChatGPT-based internet search engine will be like, or what it will even be called. Of course, there is also the question of whether it will be able to compete meaningfully with the incumbent internet search giant, Google.
