OpenAI launches ChatGPT Search, autonomous AI ‘big theme’ of 2025

OpenAI has introduced a new feature for its artificial intelligence chatbot, ChatGPT, which enhances its capability to answer questions by searching the web.

On Oct. 31, the company announced the new “ChatGPT Search” feature, a feature allowing users to search the web based on questions they ask. Users can also choose to search manually by clicking the web search icon.

Goodbye search engines?

While ChatGPT previously had limited web access, the new update claims to deliver more relevant answers than traditional search engines:

“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.”

Users can now ask questions conversationally, and ChatGPT will use information from the web to provide contextually accurate answers, respond to follow-up questions, and incorporate the chat’s full context to improve responses.

The new feature builds on OpenAI’s partnerships with major news providers globally. This includes a partnership with the Financial Times, the French publisher Le Monde, Spanish Prisa Media, and German media giant Axel Springer.

OpenAI isn’t the only tech firm working on AI-powered search. On Oct. 28, The Information reported that Meta is also developing a search tool aimed at challenging market leaders like Google and Bing.

Related: Nvidia’s new open-source AI model beats GPT-4o on benchmarks

Autonomous GPT

Along with the announcement of the ChatGPT Search feature, an AMA was held on Reddit, which included OpenAI executives CEO Sam Altman, chief product officer Kevin Weil, senior vice president of research Mark Chen, vice president of engineering ​​Srinivas Narayanan and chief scientist Jakub Pachocki. 

During the session, most answers were kept minimal. However, they still gave hints about what’s to come in the near future. 

This included Altman saying there will be updates to image generator DALL-E that are “worth the wait” and “good releases coming later this year,” but not something they’re calling GPT-5. 

Even more brow-raising was the hint of autonomous features for ChatGPT. One Reddit user asked if the chatbot could do tasks independently, to which Weil responded by saying it would be a “big theme” in 2025. 

While OpenAI has yet to make any official statements about AI autonomy, “agentic AI” — the official term for this type of functioning model — is widely anticipated within the tech industry to be a top trend in 2025.  

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