[Update May 13, 2024, 2:30 p.m.: Turns out it wasn’t a search engine at all, but a more natural chatbot and a new free tier for all ChatGPT users. Get the details here. Original story follows.]
OpenAI search engine could be just around the corner. According to from two sources available exclusively to Reutersthe company is preparing to announce its AI search plans on Monday, May 13, setting the stage for its substantial competition with other search engines, namely, of course, Google.
We don’t know much about what OpenAI has planned for its “Google killer”: rumors at the moment suggest that the search engine will exploit ChatGPT artificial intelligence technology to return results from the Internet, citing its findings. This sounds very similar to Google’s AI search results, powered by Gemini, as well as Copilot Bing searches, which are also powered by ChatGPT. (Microsoft is a major investor in OpenAI.)
But these substantial names aren’t the only pioneers of AI-powered search. Perplexity, founded by a former OpenAI employee, also offers AI search features with citations. Additionally, Perplexity includes filters to narrow your search: for example, you can choose to only display results from academic articles or set the bot to only pull sources from Reddit. (Many of us already add “Reddit” to the end of our searches anyway.)
While Reuters is the first to report the news, this isn’t the first time we’ve heard about the company’s search plans. Earlier this week, rumors of a “ChatGPT search engine” made headlines after the URL “search.chatgpt.com” was discovered. At the time, speculation indicated that OpenAI would make a substantial announcement on May 9. Thursday passed without such an announcement, but these rumors had little basis. If anonymous Reuters sources are to be believed, on Monday we will see ChatGPT Search, or whatever the company calls its search engine.
The company did not want to comment to Reuters on the facility’s modern reports, which do not tell us much. However, there is no denying that speculation about ChatGPT Search has been intensifying this week. If OpenAI does indeed have a search engine ready for retirement, it will be fascinating to see what impact it will have on the search market. How many of us would move away from Google or any preferred search engine if ChatGPT returned results? For a deeper analysis on this topic, check out my previous thoughts on ChatGPT search.
