OpenAI Reveals AI-Powered Search Engine, Which Instantly Makes Factual Mistake in Demo

Are we laughing or crying?

So Close!

ChatGPT creator OpenAI has officially entered the AI search competition with SearchGPT, an AI-powered search engine prototype that, according to the company's announcement, is designed to "combine the strength of our AI models with information from the web to give you fast and timely answers with clear and relevant sources."

But doing so without hiccups could take a while. This prototype, for instance, still has a long way to go: as caught by The Atlantic, SearchGPT didn't even manage to get through its own demo without making a factual error.

Per the magazine, a 30-second demo video of a user using SearchGPT to look for "music festivals in boone north carolina in august" returned the suggestion that music-loving North Carolinians might consider attending an event called "An Appalachian Summer Festival," which the AI says will start in late July and continue through mid-August of this year. Sounds like fun! Sadly, though, as the Atlantic correctly notes, the festival actually ends tomorrow — and started in June.

And so, with a sigh, we add SearchGPT to the ever-growing list of generative AI demo blunders. If AI companies might learn anything from the news publishers with which they're looking to ink data licensing deals, it's that fact-checking before publishing is generally good practice.

Small Potatoes

A spokesperson for OpenAI told the Atlantic that SearchGPT, which is not yet open to the broader public, is "an initial prototype," and that OpenAI will "keep improving it." It's also worth noting that this was the only error in SearchGPT's festival lineup.

But as far as searches go, compiling a list of music festivals to take place in Boone, a relatively small mountain town with a population below 20,000 people, is a pretty small-potatoes query. It'll presumably be more difficult, or at least more consequential, for OpenAI to ensure that queries for information like real-time news will return accurate and well-sourced results — though that's likely where OpenAI's publisher licensing deals will ideally come in.

Again, SearchGPT is far from the only chatbot, or chatbot-powered search product, to make a factual mistake. Google's "AI Overview" and Perplexity's "Answer Engine" have been found to confidently spew inaccuracies — or even unprompted fairytales about glowing mushrooms — in their responses. But regardless of SearchGPT's errors, or the errors of its contemporaries, that OpenAI has introduced it at all sends a message: AI search doesn't really work yet, but it's here nonetheless.