According to the two main sources, Bloomberg and The Information, OpenAI is all set to introduce its rival to Google Search a day before Google’s annual development conference. The conference is expected to target Google’s own AI products, Gemini and Gemma.
The announcement date, while currently set could be altered in the future as the set date has not been publicly disclosed before.
The sources have reported that OpenAI is working on launching its AI-powered search product - which will be an extension of ChatGPT - with the help of Microsoft to compete with rivals, Google and Perplexity. It will directly pull the information from the web along with providing the citations.
Bloomberg reported that the search feature of OpenAI will be built into ChatGPT - which everyone is now familiar with - along with citations. According to the reports of The Information, this new feature could be “partly powered by Bing”.
However, OpenAI has declined to make any comment on this statement, reported by two top sources.
Previously, several industry experts have used and recommended ChatGPT for the collection of valuable information despite its failure to meet expectations.
ChatGPT has seen massive usage (100 million monthly active users) since its launch but has struggled to provide accurate answers and real-time information. Earlier, OpenAI also provided an integration of GPT with Bing but that was only limited to paid users.
On the other hand, Perplexity, which was an initiative of an OpenAI former researcher has also seen a massive response from the users because of providing images and citations along with its text responses. Meanwhile, Google also introduced its AI-powered Bard (now Gemini).
Perhaps all those factors contributed to a decline in traffic to ChatGPT over the past year, as it experienced rapid fluctuations.
OpenAI is potentially under this pressure to retain its user base and website visitors. The company is seeking ways of sustained growth and is likely aiming to reach even higher levels of user engagement beyond its previous achievements.
Google knows what is coming for them. They know the threat that’s why Google's search boss, Prabhakar Raghavan warns its employees in a meeting, as reported by CNBC.
It’s not like life is going to be hunky-dory, forever. If there’s a clear and present market reality, we need to twitch faster, like the athletes twitch faster.
He highlighted the trustworthiness of Google and stated that it is the big reason for people to keep coming back for the verification of information, especially in the era of generative AI.
People come to us because we are trusted. They may have a new gizmo out there that people like to play with but they still come to Google to verify what they see there because it is the trusted source and it becomes more critical in this era of generative AI.
OpenAI seems to target this “Trust” factor of Google and is working aggressively to recruit Google employees to work on its own search product.
It seems a strategic move by OpenAI to enter the search market just a day before Google’s I/O event. Google is already aware of the challenge it may face to its search dominance; only time will decide what comes next.