ChatGPT itself can also remember things about users that it can use later —sometimes it does this automatically, or you can ask it to remember something. Those “long-term” memories affect how it responds to chats. Search doesn’t have this yet—a new web search starts from scratch— but it should get this capability in the “next couple of quarters,” says Fry. When it does, OpenAI says it will allow it to deliver far more personalized results based on what it knows.
“Those might be persistent memories, like ‘I’m a vegetarian,’ or it might be contextual, like ‘I’m going to New York in the next few days,’” says Fry. “If you say ‘I’m going to New York in four days,’ it can remember that fact and the nuance of that point,” he adds.
To help develop ChatGPT’s web search, OpenAI says it leveraged its partnerships with news organizations such as Reuters, the Atlantic, Le Monde, the Financial Times, Axel Springer, Condé Nast, and Time. However, its results include information not only from these publishers, but any other source online that does not actively block its search crawler.
It’s a positive development that ChatGPT will now be able to retrieve information from these reputable online sources and generate answers based on them, says Suzan Verberne, a professor of natural-language processing at Leiden University, who has studied information retrieval. It also allows users to ask follow-up questions.
But despite the enhanced ability to search the web and cross-check sources, the tool is not immune from the persistent tendency of AI language models to make things up or get it wrong. When MIT Technology Review tested the new search function and asked it for vacation destination ideas, ChatGPT suggested “luxury European destinations” such as Japan, Dubai, the Caribbean islands, Bali, the Seychelles, and Thailand. It offered as a source an article from theTimes, a British newspaper, which listed these locations as well as those in Europe as luxury holiday options.
“Especially when you ask about untrue facts or events that never happened, the engine might still try to formulate a plausible response that is not necessarily correct,” says Verberne. There is also a risk that misinformation might seep into ChatGPT’s answers from the internet if the company has not filtered its sources well enough, she adds.
Another risk is that the current push to access the web through AI search will disrupt the internet’s digital economy, argues Benjamin Brooks, a fellow at Harvard University’s Berkman Klein Center, who previously led public policy for Stability AI, in an op-ed published by MIT Technology Review today.
“By shielding the web behind an all-knowing chatbot, AI search could deprive creators of the visits and ‘eyeballs’ they need to survive,” Brooks writes.
