OpenAI's artificial intelligence (AI) product, ChatGPT, has been updated to provide more effective web search results, delivering fast, timely answers with links to relevant web sources. The new feature is designed to blend the benefits of a natural language interface with the value of up-to-date information such as sports scores, news, stock quotes, and more.

The search feature will be available on chatgpt.com, as well as on desktop and mobile apps. Access to the new feature will be granted to ChatGPT Plus and Team users, as well as SearchGPT waitlist users, immediately. Enterprise and Edu users will gain access in the next few weeks, and all Free users over the coming months.

The updated ChatGPT can now respond to questions in a more natural, conversational way, using information from the web. It can also handle follow-up questions, considering the full context of the chat to provide better answers.

OpenAI has partnered with news and data providers to add up-to-date information and new visual designs for categories like weather, stocks, sports, news, and maps. ChatGPT search now includes links to sources, such as news articles and blog posts, allowing users to learn more.

Pam Wasserstein, President of Vox Media, commented on the update, saying, "ChatGPT search promises to better highlight and attribute information from trustworthy news sources, benefiting audiences while expanding the reach of publishers like ourselves who produce premium journalism."

Louis Dreyfus, CEO & Publisher of Le Monde, also expressed optimism about the partnership with OpenAI, stating, "We are convinced that AI search will be, in a near future and for the next generations, a primary way to access information, and partnering with OpenAI positions Le Monde at the forefront of this shift. It allows us to test innovations at an early stage while safeguarding journalism’s core values and integrity."

For his part, Mathias Sanchez, SVP, Global Strategic Partnerships at Axel Springer SE, said, "As AI reshapes the media landscape, Axel Springer’s partnership with OpenAI opens up tremendous opportunities for innovative advancements. Together, we're driving new business models that ensure journalism remains both trustworthy and profitable."

The search model is a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o, post-trained using novel synthetic data generation techniques, including distilling outputs from OpenAI o1-preview.