ChatGPT will now work as a search engine as OpenAI partners with some information outlets

SAN FRANCISCO — OpenAI is launching a ChatGPT-powered search engine that could put the artificial intelligence business in direct competition with Google and affect the flow of internet traffic seeking information, sports scores and other timely information.

San Francisco-based OpenAI said Thursday it is releasing a search characteristic to paid users of ChatGPT but will eventually expand it to all ChatGPT users. It released a preview version in July to a tiny throng of users and publishers.

The original version of ChatGPT, released in 2022, was trained on huge troves of online texts but couldn’t respond to questions about up-to-date events not in its training data.

Google upended its search engine in May with AI-generated written summaries now frequently appearing at the top of search results. The summaries aim to quickly respond a user’s search query so that they don’t necessarily require to click a link and visit another website for more information.

Google’s makeover came after a year of testing with a tiny throng of users but usage still resulted in falsehoods showing the risks of ceding the search for information to AI chatbots prone to making errors known as hallucinations.

A pivot by AI companies to have their chatbots deliver information gathered by professional journalists has alarmed some information media organizations. The recent York Times is among several information outlets that have sued OpenAI and its business associate Microsoft for copyright infringement. Wall Street Journal and recent York Post publisher information Corp sued another AI search engine, Perplexity, earlier in October.

OpenAI said in a blog post Thursday that its recent search engine was built with assist from information partners, which include The Associated Press and information Corp. It will include links to sources, such as information and blog posts, the business said. It was not immediately obvious whether the links would correspond to the original source of the information presented by the chatbot.

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The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of AP’s text archives.