AI is weaving itself into the fabric of the internet with generative search

Don’t panicPichai has a message. He argues that even in the age of AI overview, people will still want to click and go deeper for many types of searches. “The underlying principle is that people come looking for information. They’re not always just looking to Google for an answer,” he says. “Sometimes yes, but most of the time, you’re looking at it as a jumping-off point.”

Reed, meanwhile, argues that because AI overviews allow people to ask more complex questions and drill down deeper into what they want, they can also be helpful for some types of publishers and small businesses, especially those that Operating in niches: “You essentially reach. a new audience, because people can now express what they want more clearly, and so someone who is a specialist doesn’t have to rank for a general query.”

^“I’m going to start with something dangerous,” Nick Turley tells me from the confines of the zoom window. Turley is head of product for ChatGPT, and he’s showing off OpenAI’s new web search tool a few weeks before it launches. “I should normally try to do this already, but I’ll just look for you,” he says. “This is always a high-risk demo to do, because people have particular attitudes about what is said about them on the Internet.”

He types my name into the search field and a prototype search engine throws back a few sentences, almost like a speaker bio. He gets to know me and my current role well. It also highlights a particular story I wrote years ago that I may have known. In short, it is the correct answer. Phew?

A few weeks after our call, OpenAI incorporated search into ChatGPT, supplementing its language model answers with information from around the web. If the model thinks a response would benefit from up-to-date information, it will automatically run a web search (OpenAI won’t say who its search partners are) and incorporate those responses into its response, with learn more links if you want. You can also choose to manually force it to search the web if it doesn’t do so on its own. OpenAI won’t disclose how many people are using its web search, but it says about 250 million people use ChatGPT weekly, all of whom are likely exposed to it.

“There is an incredible amount of content on the web. A lot of things are happening in real time. You want ChatGPT to use it to improve its answers and become a better super-assistant for you.”

Kevin Weil, Chief Product Officer, OpenAI

According to Fishkin, these new forms of AI-assisted search are not yet challenging Google’s search dominance. “It doesn’t appear to be cannibalizing the classic forms of web search,” he says.

OpenAI insists that it’s not really trying to compete on search—though frankly this seems like a bit of expectation setting to me. Instead, he says, web searches are a means of obtaining more current information than the data in his training models, which have specific cutoff dates that are often months or even a year or more away. As a result, while ChatGPT may be great for explaining how the West Coast offense works, it’s long been useless at telling you what the latest 49ers score is. not more.

“I came from the perspective of ‘How can we enable ChatGPT to answer every question you have? How can we make it more useful for you on a daily basis?’ And that’s where discovery comes in for us,” Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s chief product officer, tells me. “There is an incredible amount of content on the web. A lot of things are happening in real time. You want ChatGPT to be able to use it to improve its answers and become a better super-assistant for you.”