OpenAI Shipped Search. The Hard Part Was IndexedDB.
ChatGPT gets web search on Halloween, which is appropriate.
ChatGPT Search shipped and worked. The IndexedDB observation — that the frontier is always constrained by something mundane — became a perfect example of how AI products actually ship.
OpenAI shipped ChatGPT Search today — October 31, 2024 — and the thing I keep coming back to is not the search itself but the indexedDB.
Someone noticed they had to add indexedDB support to ship this. IndexedDB. The browser storage API that has existed since 2015, that every extension developer has a complicated relationship with, that MDN describes with the kind of weary patience you use when explaining something to a person who will not remember it. That's what was load-bearing here.
There's a version of the story where OpenAI is this world-historical AI lab rewriting the rules of intelligence — and then there's the version where the thing that held up shipping a search product was a client-side key-value store. Both versions are true. This is how software works. The frontier is always blocked by something embarrassing.
The timing is Halloween, which — fine, I'm not going to do the joke. OpenAI didn't plan this around spooky season. They planned it around however long it took to get indexedDB working, which apparently was a while.
Big release day from the crew. Going to be a long night reading changelogs.
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