🧙🏼 Meet ChatGPT Search

Howdy, wizards.

Big feature launch today for ChatGPT and a Reddit AMA session with OpenAI reveals a lot of juicy details on what’s coming.

It’s BREWING in AI today.

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1. OpenAI launches web search for ChatGPT

ChatGPT just got a way better web search. They’ve fine-tuned a version of GPT-4o to provide fast, up-to-date answers with relevant sources cited.

What’s happening here is that SearchGPT, a prototype which was limited to only select users, is now being integrated into the broader ChatGPT experience. It allows you to search the web by chatting, and remembers the context when you ask follow-up questions. To provide answers, it uses a combination of third-party search providers (like Bing) and publishers they’ve partnered with (News Corp, Associated Press, Condé Nast, Financial Times, and more).

They’re also adding visual designs to specific queries (similar to what Perplexity recently did with finance and sports) for weather, stocks, sports, news and maps.

Rolling out now to Plus and Team users, Enterprise and Edu in the next weeks, and free users in the coming months.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ Building AI into the way we search for information is on every AI company’s agenda right now (along with building agents). Perplexity with their multi-model search, Google with AI summaries, Microsoft building AI into Bing..

AI search is unlikely to overtake Google search anytime soon though; it still hallucinates and is overconfident when faced with ambiguity. For now, traditional search and AI search are good for different things. BUT, this might change over time – one thing OpenAI says they’re working on to improve the search feature is leveraging the o1-models reasoning capabilities.

OpenAI also said in the AMA on Reddit (all about that below) one of the things that could set ChatGPT search apart from traditional search in the future is its ability to render custom web pages in response.

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2. Reddit AMA with Sam Altman and key staff at OpenAI

Key execs from OpenAI just did an AMA on Reddit—a live Q&A with guests who answers users’ questions. The people who participated were Sam Altman (CEO), Jakub Pachocki (Chief Scientist), Mark Chen (SVP of Research), Kevin Weil (CPO), Srinivas Narayanan (VP Engineering).

I’ve browsed through hundreds of Q&A replies for you, and synthesised 12 key insights, presented below in ranked order by how interesting I found them:

• 👀 Sam Altman believes AGI is achievable with current hardware. When asked if AGI is possible with known neural net architectures, the response was “Does it count if the architecture breakthrough is proposed by an existing LLM?”.

• When asked about upcoming models, Sam Altman confirmed they have some “very good releases” coming later this year, but no new model that will be called GPT-5, though – the team is prioritising o1 and its successors.

• ChatGPT performing tasks on its own will be a “big theme” in 2025. The next thing that will feel like a “giant breakthrough” from OpenAI is agents.

• Expanding ChatGPT’s context window is something the team is actively working on.

• GPT-4o 3D image model generation is coming soon.

• Sora apparently still has a bunch of things that need to be worked out before release.

• OpenAI actually wants to create a mode for enabling nsfw content, but says it’s hard to get this right and have more urgent priorities right now.

• OpenAI plans to continue both the “regular” model series ie GPT-3, 4, 5, and so on, as well as their o-series ie. o1, o2.

• Best way to get AI skills? Use it for everything.

• Sam Altman seems generally positive about applications of ChatGPT as a therapist. His favourite ChatGPT use case? Stories of people using ChatGPT to find causes of a debilitating disease.

• An underutilized use case is uploading personal knowledge (course notes, travel recommendations, etc) to a custom GPT for others to use.

• Q: “What did Ilya see?” A: “the transcendent future”.

‎ Why it matters‎ ‎ OpenAI just spilled a lot of tea about their strategic priorities – everyone leveraging, building and competing in this space should take note.

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