OpenAI debuted a new way to more efficiently manage your growingChatGPT chat historyon Tuesday:a search function for the web app. With it, you’ll be able to quickly surface previous references and chats to cite within your currentChatGPTconversation.
“We’re starting to roll out the ability to search through your chat history on ChatGPT web,” the company announcedvia a post on X (formerly Twitter). “Now you’re able to quickly & easily bring up a chat to reference, or pick up a chat where you left off.”
History search is a distinct feature fromthe SearchGPT prototypethat was released in July. SearchGPT is designed to “combine the strength of our AI models with information from the web to give you fast and timely answers with clear and relevant sources,” according to its product page — essentially mimicking Perplexity’s “AI as a click-saving answer machine” template.
Rather than using AI to summarize search results, as Google’s AI Overview does, SearchGPT would “quickly and directly respond to your questions with up-to-date information from the web while giving you clear links to relevant sources.”
Tuesday’s in-chat search feature was initiallyspotted by developers in late August, code-named “Fanny Pack Chat Sidebar.” Tibor Blaho, engineering lead at AIPRM,confirmed the feature’s existenceearlier this week while also noting that “SearchGPT integration into ChatGPT now has a separate new feature flag ‘search tool’ (including custom GPTs, where it is replacing ‘Web Browsing’ with ‘Web Search’).”
Given the number of times that Perplexityhas been accused of outright plagiarism in 2024 alone(the startup is currentlybeing sued by News Corpover accusations of copyright infringement on a “massive scale”), OpenAI’s decision to follow suit seems a bit hypocritical — especially so afterits argument against paying for copyrighted contentearlier this year.
