Reuters, May 9 According to two people familiar with the situation, OpenAI intends to unveil its AI-powered search tool on Monday, upping the ante in its rivalry with search giant Google.
The announcement date has not been released previously, however it is open to change. According to reports from Bloomberg and the Information, Microsoft (MSFT.O) has launched a new tab for OpenAI, which is developing a search engine to potentially take on Alphabet’s (GOOGL.O) Google and the well-funded AI search firm Perplexity.
Prior to Reuters’ report being released on Thursday, OpenAI declined to comment.
OpenAI said on X on Friday after it was published that it would broadcast a live event on Monday to “demo some ChatGPT and GPT-4 updates.”
Later, CEO Sam Altman wrote on X, saying, “We’ve been working hard on some new stuff we hope people will appreciate! It’s not a search engine, and it’s not gpt-5! seems magical to me.”
After Altman’s post, Alphabet’s stock saw a partial recovery, closing the day down 0.9%.
It is possible that OpenAI timed their announcements to coincide with the opening of Google’s annual I/O conference on Tuesday, when the tech giant is anticipated to reveal a number of AI-related products.
According to Bloomberg, OpenAI’s search tool is an addition to its popular ChatGPT product, allowing ChatGPT to retrieve straight Web material along with citations. OpenAI’s chatbot product, ChatGPT, generates responses to text prompts that resemble those of a human using the company’s state-of-the-art AI models.
Industry watchers have long referred to ChatGPT as a substitute for obtaining Internet data, despite the fact that it has had difficulty delivering precise and current Web data. An early integration with Microsoft’s Bing was provided by OpenAI for premium subscribers. Google, meanwhile, has revealed generative AI capabilities for its own search engine.
A former OpenAI researcher established the $1 billion startup Perplexity, which has garnered popularity by offering an AI-native search experience that displays citations in results and pictures in addition to text in its responses. Ten million people use it each month, as per a blog post the startup published in January.
Following its launch in late 2022, OpenAI’s ChatGPT product was dubbed the fastest application to ever attain 100 million monthly active users at the time. However, according to analytics firm Similarweb, global traffic to ChatGPT’s website has been volatile over the past year and is only now reaching its May 2023 peak. This puts pressure on the AI startup to grow its user base.
ChatGPT plugins, a previous attempt to incorporate current and real-world data into ChatGPT, were abandoned in April, as per a help centre article on OpenAI’s website.