OpenAI plans to announce its artificial intelligence-powered search engine on Monday, upping the ante in its competition with search king Google, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
The announcement date, although subject to change, has not been previously announced. Bloomberg and the Information reported that Microsoft-backed OpenAI is working on a search product that could compete with Alphabet’s Google and Perplexity, a well-funded AI search startup.
OpenAI declined to comment.
The announcement could come a day before Tuesday’s start of the annual Google I/O conference, where the tech giant is expected to showcase a slew of artificial intelligence products.
According to Bloomberg, OpenAI’s search engine is an extension of its flagship ChatGPT product and allows ChatGPT to pull direct information from the Internet and attach citations. ChatGPT is an OpenAI chatbot product that uses the company’s cutting-edge artificial intelligence models to generate human responses to text prompts.
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Industry observers have long called ChatGPT an alternative to online information gathering, although it struggles to deliver precise information from the web in real time. OpenAI previously enabled it to integrate with Microsoft’s Bing for paid subscribers. Meanwhile, Google announced generative AI features for its own engine of the same name.
The $1 billion startup Perplexity was founded by a former OpenAI researcher and gained popularity by providing an AI-native search interface that displays quotes in results and images, as well as text in replies. According to the startup’s January blog post, it has 10 million monthly lively users.
At the time, OpenAI’s ChatGPT product was being called the fastest app ever to reach 100 million monthly lively users after its launch in delayed 2022. However, worldwide traffic to ChatGPT’s website was explosive last year and has only now returned to peak levels, according to analytics firm Likeweb levels in May 2023, and the AI company is under pressure to expand its user base. An earlier attempt to introduce up-to-date and real information into ChatGPT, called ChatGPT plugins, was discontinued in April, according to a aid center post on the OpenAI website.
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