The AI web search engine ChatGPT has rekindled the Big Tech search battle.

Officially, ChatGPT is now an online search engine powered by artificial intelligence (AI). The search feature for ChatGPT's premium users and a Chrome extension for desktop and mobile users were both released on Thursday by OpenAI, the American startup that first introduced ChatGPT as a generative AI chatbot in November 2022. Big tech's search battles have gotten more intense once more, which has led to the $2 trillion question of whether Google's search supremacy can be challenged. Perplexity AI, an AI-powered internet search business, has introduced features including "navigational query" and "internal knowledge search." According to sources, a new round of money is almost ready to be raised, which could increase the company's valuation to $8 billion. It is said that Meta is developing its own search function for the Meta AI personal assistant. In the meantime.

Similar to a search engine, OpenAI's conversational chatbot ChatGPT can now do web searches and provide answers to questions along with links to pertinent online resources. The feature was initially made available as a prototype known as "SearchGPT," which was created to integrate web data with the conversational powers of AI models.

ChatGPT's answers were previously restricted to the date that its base model was last trained. The chatbot can now produce real-time responses, including breaking news insights, stock market movements, live sports scores, weather notifications, and currency exchange rates, by combining this with search.

Is there a rival to Google?

Analysts claim that AI-powered search is bringing about a fundamental change in how people use the internet.
According to Arun Chandrasekaran, senior VP analyst at Gartner, "Search has gotten a lot more interesting in 2024 - thanks to Perplexity and OpenAI." "It is much more direct to the consumer, persuasive, and personalized."
Researchers have begun to consider how GenAI, which can learn on its own and respond to the unique behavior of individual users, can change advertising.

It is yet uncertain if GenAI-based search will be able to overtake market leaders like Google Chrome, given that the latter holds 80% of the market and is already using its proprietary Gemini model to power AI summary. Google announced last week that its third-quarter search revenue was $49.4 billion. Its search division continued to be the biggest contributor to the company's revenue growth, bringing in $49.4 billion in sales, up 12.3% from the previous year.

Google is a strong rival in this market. It is difficult to imitate their branding, comprehension of search visualization, and extensive go-to-market collaborations in the foreseeable future, according to Chandrasekaran.

What other issues are there?

Hallucinations and skewed output are still common general hazards associated with AI.
Any search interface's main goal is to deliver accurate and dependable information as fast as possible with the least amount of work. The level of comfort required for these fundamental objectives has not yet been attained by GenAI prompting.
AI models are continuously educated to perform better, and the level of detail in the user-provided prompt has a significant impact on the caliber of their answers.

The cost of computing is the most significant and crucial issue. A single ChatGPT inquiry uses 2.9 watt-hours of electricity, which is over ten times more than a Google search, which uses 0.3 watt-hours, according to the International Energy Agency. Combining a conversational AI revolution with a search use-case will result in more user prompts, which will raise energy usage significantly.