As Google continues to slowly erode the quality of its search engine, OpenAI appears interested in challenging the company's continued market dominance. The AI ​​firm announced Monday that it is opening access to ChatGPT Search to all users after previously hiding the feature behind a subscription paywall.

the advertisementwhich is the latest in OpenAI's “12 Days of OpenAI” event which saw the announcement of several new products including Sora video generator and $200 per month Pro subscription planwill allow anyone logged into their ChatGPT account on desktop or mobile to access the search feature. The company also said that users will be able to select ChatGPT Search as their default search engine in their preferred web browser.

ChatGPT Search received a few rave reviews from early adopters. The platform is trained primarily on data provided by publications that OpenAI collaborates with, including the Associated Press, Reuters, and Condé Nast, so in theory it should always pull from primary sources rather than type content. content to enter. Google AI summaries.

But it has many doubts, too. Michael Ann DeVito, a professor of computer science and communication studies at Northeastern University, questioned the accuracy of the platform, SPEAKING Northeastern Global News"There's still no actual intelligence, no context matching pattern based on the language, so there's still a good chance that some of the spewing will be misleading or nonsense."

Research CONDUCTED by Columbia University's Tow Center for Digital Journalism found that assessment to be correct. They tasked ChatGPT with identifying 200 citations, asking the platform to provide attribution including publication, publication date, and URL. it failed his mission 153 times. In trouble, the researchers also found that the service is reliably flawed, spitting out its answers in reassuring language most of the time, only claiming to be unable to provide accurate information.

Accuracy is a big thing when it comes to searching. And people are already getting a bad taste in their mouths from other AI-powered search products. Microsoft made a big splash when it announced it would expand its search engine with AI-derived results and a chatbot-like interface, but it failed to actually gain much—if any—market share.

A CivicScience poll found that nearly half of all people were straight up uninterested in AI-assisted search, compared to only a quarter who were actually interested in receiving it. A Poll by the Pew Research Center found that more than half of Americans are worried about the increased use of AI, compared to just 10% who said they were more excited than worried.

Perhaps ChatGPT Search is the one who changed this by confidently teaching people the wrong information. But there now appears to be a clear opportunity in the search space, because there is a distinct lack of options that do not suck.