SAN FRANCISCO — (AP) — OpenAI is launching a ChatGPT-powered search engine that could put the artificial intelligence company in direct competition with Google and affect the flow of internet traffic seeking news, sports scores and other timely information.
San Francisco-based OpenAI said Thursday it is releasing a search feature to paid users of ChatGPT but will eventually expand it to all ChatGPT users. It released a preview version in July to a small group 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 answer a user’s search query so that they don’t necessarily need to click a link and visit another website for more information.
Google’s makeover came after a year of testing with …