SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — OpenAI launches ChatGPT-powered search engine that could put the spotlight on artificial intelligence company in direct competition with Google and affect the flow of Internet traffic searching for news, sports scores and other current information.

San Francisco-based OpenAI announced Thursday that it will offer a search function to paid ChatGPT users, but will eventually expand it to all ChatGPT users. He published a preliminary version in July to a small group of users and editors.

The original version of ChatGPT, released in 2022, was trained on huge amounts of online text, but could not answer questions about up-to-date events that were not in its training data.

Google disrupted its search engine in May, with AI-generated written summaries now frequently appearing at the top of search results. Summaries aim to quickly answer a user’s search query so 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 a small group of users, but usage always results in lies showing the risks of ceding the search for information to AI chatbots prone to making errors called hallucinations.

The willingness of AI companies to let their chatbots disseminate information gathered by professional journalists has alarmed some news media. The New York Times is among several media outlets that have sued OpenAI and its business partner Microsoft for copyright infringement. The Wall Street Journal and New York Post publisher News Corp sued another AI search engine, Perplexity, earlier in October.

OpenAI said in a blog post Thursday that its new search engine was built with help from news partners including the Associated Press and News Corp. It will include links to sources, such as news and blog posts, the company said. It was not immediately clear whether the links would match the original source of the information presented by the chatbot.

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The Associated Press and OpenAI have a license and technology agreement which allows OpenAI to access part of AP’s text archives.

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