OpenAI

OpenAI might have a Google Search competitor come Monday, and that’s just a day before Google I/O.

Source: OpenAI

Key Takeaways

OpenAI set to unveil AI-powered search product, challenging Google’s dominance in the search landscape.
New search engine from OpenAI enhances ChatGPT’s capabilities by allowing direct web data retrieval with citations.
Announcement strategically timed just before Google I/O, likely to provoke a response from the search giant.

OpenAI has been teasing that it has some new technology cooking for quite a while, and GPT-5 has been long-teased with that. In a surprising twist, though, OpenAI is poised to announce a new AI-powered search product on Monday, Reuters has reported. This announcement is said to be scheduled a day before Google’s I/O conference, maybe even as a calculated preemptive strike against the search behemoth’s expected assortment of AI innovations.

OpenAI, a company at the forefront of AI technology and the driving force behind GPT language models, has apparently developed a full-blown search engine that builds upon ChatGPT. This new offering will allow ChatGPT to fetch direct information from the web, complete with citations, enhancing its utility and accuracy. This aims to address a longstanding limitation of ChatGPT — its struggle with real-time and accurate web data retrieval.

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Search ambitions and Google I/O

The timing is very deliberate

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generative AI Google Search — Image source: Google

According to Reutersobservers in the industry have long viewed ChatGPT as a potential alternative to traditional search methods, albeit hampered by its previous inability to integrate up-to-the-minute web data. This was somewhat mitigated by an earlier integration with Microsoft’s Bing, though it would set you back some cash to get that feature. However, with its own search engine, OpenAI appears ready to leapfrog this setup, offering direct web access to users.

The timing of this expected announcement is almost certainly directly aimed at Google, and it’s said to arrive on the eve of Google’s I/O event. Google has long been the undisputed leader in search, but the landscape is shifting with the rise of AI-driven platforms. OpenAI’s move is almost certainly a direct challenge to Google, goading the company into potentially releasing yet another half-baked product. Remember how bad Bard was at first?

Google isn’t the only competitor OpenAI is looking to take down, either. Perplexity is an AI-powered search engine founded by a former OpenAI researcher. Perplexity has managed to carve out a niche with its AI-native search interface that also emphasizes citations in its results, boasting 10 million monthly active users in a January blog post.

OpenAI could change when it intends to launch its Search competitor, but all signs point to the company wanting to prod the bear of Google. When ChatGPT first took off, multiple reports claimed that Google treated it as a “code red” threat to the company’s future. With OpenAI now directly focusing on Search, and a waning confidence in Google’s ability to provide quality search results, we may see the company react in a similar way again.