OpenAI Ready To Announce Artificial Intelligence-Based Search Machine Products

JAKARTA - OpenAI plans to announce artificial intelligence-based search products on Monday, May 13, according to two sources familiar with the matter. This certainly increases its competition with the king of Google search engines.

Bloomberg and The Information have also reported that Microsoft-backed OpenAI is working on search engine products to potentially compete with Alphabet's Google and with Perplexity, a well-funded AI search startup.

Meanwhile, OpenAI still declined to comment on it.

Next OpenAI on Friday 10 May posted on X that the company will broadcast live events on Monday, to "show some ChatGPT and GPT-4 updates."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman later posted on X, "not gpt-5, not search engines, but we've worked hard on some new things that we thought people would like! It feels like magic to me."

Alphabet shares partially recovered from a decline of more than 2% after Altman's post, and last fell 0.9%.

OpenAI's announcement may be scheduled a day before the start of Google's annual conference I/O on Tuesday, where the tech giant is expected to reveal a number of products related to artificial intelligence.

OpenAI search products are an expansion of its flagship product, ChatGPT, and allow ChatGPT to take direct information from the Web and include quotes. ChatGPT is an OpenAI chatbot product that uses the company's leading AI model to generate human-like responses to text requests.

Industry observers have long referred to ChatGPT as an alternative to gathering online information, although it is experiencing difficulties in providing accurate and real-time information from the Web. OpenAI previously provided it with Microsoft's Bing for paid subscribers. Meanwhile, Google has announced a generating AI feature for search engines by its own name.

The Perplexity startup, which has a $1 billion valuation, was founded by former OpenAI researchers, and has gained attention through providing an AI-native search interface featuring citations in results and images as well as text in its response. According to the startup blog post in January, they have 10 million monthly active users.

At the time, OpenAI's ChatGPT product was called the fastest app ever to reach 100 million monthly active users after being launched at the end of 2022. However, global traffic to the ChatGPT website has fluctuated over the past year and has only peaked again in May 2023, according to analytic firm Similarweb, and the AI company feels pressured to expand its user base.

Previous attempts to bring the latest and real-world information into ChatGPT, known as the ChatGPTia, were discontinued in April, according to a help center post on the OpenAI website.