OpenAI Tipped to Launch ChatGPT Search Engine
- By Paul Mah
- May 09, 2024
OpenAI is reportedly preparing a web search product that will put it into direct competition with Google.
Chatter around this possibility first picked up last week. This was followed by a report on Bloomberg this week which cited a person familiar with the matter.
According to the Bloomberg report, OpenAI is developing a feature for ChatGPT that can search the web and cite sources in its results. And that this service could be announced as soon as this week.
A question of when
The possibility of a search product from OpenAI isn’t new and had been mooted years ago. Indeed, we first wrote about how ChatGPT could disrupt Google’s business model in 2022.
As we noted then, search engines of the future could be used by AI agents to gather relevant information and links, which are then summarized to give users the precise information they want. Instead of having to click through multiple search results, users get the information they want neatly summarized in a single page.
Rumors surfaced again this year in February in a report on The Information. And OpenAI CEO Sam Altman himself hasn’t shied away from the possibility of going into search.
As reported on BGR, Altman in a podcast last month said: “The intersection of LLMs plus search, I don’t think anyone has cracked the code on yet. I would love to go do that. I think that would be cool.”
OpenAI won’t be the first to offer an AI-powered search experience. Valued at USD1 billion, Perplexity AI offers an increasingly popular AI-powered search known for its accuracy, citations, and ability to choose from either GPT-4 Turbo or Claude Optus LLMs.
For now, don’t expect Google to lie still. For a start, it is expected to announce improvements to its core search engine experience, which is likely to be updated to include AI-infused results.
Paul Mah
Paul Mah is the editor of DSAITrends, where he report on the latest developments in data science and AI. A former system administrator, programmer, and IT lecturer, he enjoys writing both code and prose.