OpenAI’s Google Search Competitor Could Be Announced on Monday

OpenAI could be planning to announce an AI-powered search engine just a day before Google kicks off its annual I/O developer conference on Tuesday, May 14. Reuters is reporting today that the announcement could be coming on Monday, according to two sources familiar with the matter.

The Information first reported in February that OpenAI was working its own alternative to Google Search, and Bloomberg shared the first details about how it will work earlier this week. This new search product is reportedly designed as an extension of ChatGPT that can pull information from the web with citations to sources, something that ChatGPT’s answers currently lack.

When ChatGPT launched in the fall of 2022, the AI chatbot was trained using public data up to September 2021, so it didn’t have access to up to date information. At its Dev Day conference in November, OpenAI said that it had increased the cutoff date for its GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 Turbo models to January 2022 and April 2023, respectively, though this still isn’t good enough.

Paid ChatGPT users also have the option to search the web with Microsoft’s Bing search engine. Bing, however, puts AI-powered search results next to traditional results on its search results page, and it does that for free. Google is also doing a similar experiment with its Search Generative Experience, which is currently only available in preview in select markets.

If OpenAI created one of the fastest-growing apps ever with ChatGPT, the AI chatbot won’t be able to completely replace traditional search engines if it doesn’t offer the same web search capabilities. Google is also expected to have many AI-related announcements at its I/O conference next week, so OpenAI would indeed be smart to announce its Google Search competitor a day before the search giant can replicate.