OpenAI is ramping up efforts to dethrone Alphabet Inc's
What To Know: OpenAI announced Thursday that its flagship product, ChatGPT, is now capable of crawling the web for up-to-date news, sports scores, stock quotes and more.
"You can get fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources, which you would have previously needed to go to a search engine for," the company said.
A new web search feature - ChatGPT Search - can be manually selected when using the platform. The new search capabilities can also be automatically triggered based on what a user asks.
OpenAI's ChatGPT is the fastest-growing consumer application in history. It was estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users within two months of its late 2022 launch. The company was seeing an average of about 13 million unique visitors per day at that time.
OpenAI announced at the beginning of October that more than 250 million people are now using ChatGPT on a daily basis.
Why It Matters: Following the early success of ChatGPT, several big tech companies raced to build their own large language models and incorporate generative AI into their workflows.
Microsoft added generative search features to its Bing search engine. Google also introduced several AI features for its Search product, which generated $49.4 billion in revenue for the third quarter. That's up from $44 billion in the prior year's quarter.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai explained in a third-quarter earnings report that AI features are expanding what people search for and how they search for it.
"Our commitment to innovation, as well as our long-term focus and investment in AI, are paying off with consumers and partners benefiting from our AI tools," Pichai said.
Alphabet shares traded higher following the company's third-quarter results. The stock moved lower Thursday afternoon after OpenAI announced ChatGPT Search. Google shares were down 1.77% at $171.38 at the time of publication, per Benzinga Pro.
ChatGPT Search will be available at ChatGPT.com, as well as on the company's desktop and mobile apps. It's available to ChatGPT Plus, Team users and SearchGPT waitlist users as of Thursday. Enterprise and education users will gain access in the next few weeks. Free users will be able to access the search capabilities in the coming months.
