Upgrade enables users to receive 'fast, timely answers' with links to relevant web sources

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. 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.

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. 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.

OpenAI launches ChatGPT web search to rival Google, partners with major publishers, and invests $5 billion in custom AI chips while Microsoft takes $1.5B quarterly hit from its AI investments.

The option will let the chatbot's users search for timely information and get responses with in-line attribution to news publishers and other data sources.