OpenAI plans to announce its artificial intelligence (AI)-powered search product on Monday, two sources familiar with the matter said, raising the stakes in its competition with search king Google.
The announcement date, though subject to change, has not been previously reported.
Microsoft Corp’s OpenAI is working on a search product to potentially compete with Alphabet Inc’s Google and a well-funded AI search start-up’s Perplexity, Bloomberg and The Information said.
Photo: AFP
OpenAI declined to comment.
The announcement could be timed a day before Google I/O 2024, which starts on Tuesday next week, where the tech giant is expected to unveil a slew of AI-related products.
OpenAI’s search product is an extension of its flagship ChatGPT product, and enables ChatGPT to pull information directly from the Web and include citations, Bloomberg said. ChatGPT is a chatbot which uses the company’s cutting-edge AI models to generate human-like responses to text prompts.
Industry observers have long called ChatGPT an alternative for gathering online information, though it has struggled with providing accurate and real-time information from the Web. OpenAI earlier integrated with Microsoft’s Bing for paid subscribers.
Google has also announced generative AI features for its own namesake engine.
Meanwhile, Perplexity has gained traction as an AI-native search interface that shows citations in results and images, as well as text in its responses. It was founded by a former OpenAI researcher and currently has a valuation of US$1 billion.
Perplexity has 10 million monthly active users, the start-up wrote in a blog post in January.
At the time, ChatGPT was called the fastest application to ever reach 100 million monthly active users after it launched in late 2022.
However, worldwide traffic to ChatGPT’s Web site has been on a roller-coaster ride in the past year and is only now returning to its peak in May last year, analytics firm Similarweb said, adding that the AI company is under pressure to expand its user base.
An earlier attempt to bring updated and real-world information to ChatGPT, called ChatGPT plugins, was retired last month, OpenAI said in a help center posting on its Web site.
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