The search feature positions the company as a direct competitor to major search engines, most notably Google but also Bing, a product of OpenAI’s biggest investor Microsoft.

Integrating generative AI into search engines has become something of an ARMs race among tech companies, even as AI has a track record of producing inaccurate results and posing copyright concerns.

“Getting answers on the web can take a lot of effort, often requiring multiple attempts to get relevant results,” OpenAI said in a blogpost which hailed “a new way” to search. “We believe that by enhancing the conversational capabilities of our models with real-time information from the web, finding what you’re looking for can be faster and easier.”