OpenAI is announcing its much-anticipated entry into the search market, SearchGPT, an AI-powered search engine with real-time access to information across the internet. The search engine starts with a large textbox that asks the user, “What are you looking for?” But rather than returning a plain list of links, SearchGPT tries to organize and make sense of them. In one example from OpenAI, the search engine summarizes its findings on music festivals and then presents short descriptions of the events followed by an attribution link.

SearchGPT is just a “prototype” for now. The service is powered by the GPT-4 family of models and will only be accessible to 10,000 test users at launch, OpenAI spokesperson Kayla Wood tells The Verge. Wood says that OpenAI is working with third-party partners and using direct content feeds to build its search results. The goal is to eventually integrate the search features directly into ChatGPT.

Releasing its search engine as a prototype helps OpenAI in a few different ways. First, if SearchGPT’s results are wildly incorrect — like when Google rolled out AI Overviews and told us to put glue on our pizza — it’s easier to say, well, it’s a prototype! There’s also potential for getting attributions wrong or maybe wholesale ripping off articles like Perplexity was accused of doing.