By Anna Tong
(Reuters) – OpenAI plans to announce its artificial intelligence-based search product on Monday, according to two sources familiar with the matter, raising the stakes in its competition with search king Google.
The announcement date, although subject to change, has not been previously announced. Bloomberg and Information reported that Microsoft-backed OpenAI is working on a search product that could compete with Alphabet’s Google and Perplexity, a well-funded AI search startup.
OpenAI declined to comment.
The announcement could come a day before Tuesday’s start of Google’s annual I/O conference, 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 allows ChatGPT to extract information directly from the web and include citations, according to Bloomberg. ChatGPT is OpenAI’s chatbot product that uses the company’s cutting-edge AI models to generate human-like responses to text prompts.
Industry observers have long viewed ChatGPT as an alternative to online information gathering, although it has struggled to deliver accurate, real-time information from the web. OpenAI had previously offered it integration with Microsoft’s Bing for paid subscribers. Meanwhile, Google announced generative AI features for its own eponymous engine.
The $1 billion startup Perplexity was founded by a former OpenAI researcher and gained traction by providing an AI-native search interface that displays citations in results and images as well as text in his responses. It has 10 million monthly active users, according to a blog post from the startup published in January.
At the time, OpenAI’s ChatGPT product was considered the fastest app to ever reach 100 million monthly active users following its launch in late 2022. However, global traffic to ChatGPT’s website saw a roller coaster ride over the past year and is just now. returning to its May 2023 peak, according to analytics firm Similarweb, and the AI company is under pressure to expand its user base.
An earlier attempt to import updated, real-world information into ChatGPT, called ChatGPT plugins, was abandoned in April, according to a help center post on the OpenAI website.
(Reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco; editing by Kenneth Li and Matthew Lewis)
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