As part of its “12 Days of OpenAI” event, OpenAI has yet another update for ChatGPT, this time bringing its Search feature over to the free tier. The Google Search alternative was previously only for paid subscribers in the ChatGPT Plus or Pro tiers.
“We rolled it out for paid users about two months ago,” Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s chief product officer, said during Monday’s livestream. “I can’t imagine ChatGPT without Search now. I use it so often. I’m so excited to bring it to all of you for free starting today.”
The feature is designed to search the internet, scrape information from relevant websites, and synthesize that data into a conversational answer without the need to click through a search results page yourself. It’s functionally identical to what Perplexity AI offers, allowing ChatGPT to compete with the increasingly popular app.
“We are making it possible to search in Advanced Voice Mode while you are in ChatGPT,” Weil continued. “We are also bringing Search to all logged-in users of ChatGPT for free. It is now available to all users around the globe on any platform.”
While the company is undeniably bullish on ChatGPT Search’s value to users, a recent study out of Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism found that the feature to be “confidently wrong” in many of its answers. “From each publisher [20 publishers in total] , we selected 10 articles and extracted specific quotes,” the researchers wrote. “These quotes were chosen because, when entered into search engines like Google or Bing, they reliably returned the source article among the top three results. We then evaluated whether ChatGPT’s new search tool accurately identified the original source for each quote.
“In total, ChatGPT returned partially or entirely incorrect responses on [153] occasions, though it only acknowledged an inability to accurately respond to a query seven times,” the study found. “Only in those seven outputs did the chatbot use qualifying words and phrases like ‘appears,’ ‘it’s possible,’ or ‘might,’ or statements like ‘I couldn’t locate the exact article.’”
Monday marks the eighth day of OpenAI’s live-streaming event. So far, the company has unveiled the full version of its o1 reasoning model, a $200/month Pro tier subscription plan, an organizational Projects feature, video capabilities for Advanced Voice Mode, updates to the Canvas feature, and the debut of the Sora video generation model.