OpenAI plans to announce Google’s search rival on Monday, two sources say

OpenAI plans to announce its artificial intelligence search product on Monday, raising the stakes in its competition with search king Google, according to two people familiar with the matter.

The announcement date, although subject to change, has not previously been announced. Bloomberg and The Information reported that Microsoft-backed OpenAI is working on a search product designed to compete with Alphabet’s Google and Perplexity, a well-funded artificial intelligence startup.

OpenAI declined to comment.

The announcement could come a day before Google’s annual I/O conference begins on Tuesday, where the tech giant is expected to unveil a series of artificial intelligence-related products.

According to Bloomberg, OpenAI’s search product is an extension of its flagship ChatGPT product and allows ChatGPT to retrieve information directly from the Internet and include citations. ChatGPT is an OpenAI chatbot product that uses the company’s advanced artificial intelligence models to generate human responses to text prompts.

Industry observers have long viewed ChatGPT as an alternative to online information collection, although it has difficulty delivering accurate, real-time information from the Internet. OpenAI has already integrated it with Microsoft Bing for paid subscribers. For its part, Google announced generative artificial intelligence functions for its own engine.

The $1 billion startup Perplexity was founded by a former OpenAI researcher. The company has made a name for itself by offering its own AI-powered search interface that displays quotes in results and images, as well as text in responses. According to the startup’s blog post from January, it has 10 million monthly active users.

At the time, OpenAI’s ChatGPT product was considered the fastest application to reach 100 million monthly active users after launching in late 2022. However, ChatGPT’s global website traffic has been on a roller coaster ride for the past year and is only now returning to peak in May 2023, according to data analytics firm Similar Web, and the artificial intelligence company is under pressure to expand its user base.

According to a help center post on the OpenAI website, an earlier attempt to introduce current, real-world information into ChatGPT, called ChatGPT plugins, was discontinued in April. (Reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco; Editing by Kenneth Lee and Matthew Lewis)