By next week, we might have an OpenAI search engine. There are rumors in the market that OpenAI is going to take on Google in the field of its own expertise, which is search. The rumors surfaced back in February when The Information reported the possibility of an AI-powered search by OpenAI.
ChatGPT search is possible
Google has been continuously losing the race in artificial intelligence with its cautious approach and waiting to launch its products after maturity, while OpenAI has been making waves with Microsoft backing. Even Microsoft’s search side gained some momentum after it integrated OpenAI’s tech into its Bing search engine, while Google, which still holds 90% of the search market, is struggling and is going to be confronted by OpenAI head-on.
The new search engine is expected to be based on ChatGPT technology and will function like a chatbot, as users can ask questions and get results in the form of answers, but with live data. Google Gemini and Perplexity can be taken as examples.
OpenAI has not said anything officially about its search engine debut, but the reports hint at the possibility that it might make the announcement on May 9. The coincidence of the registration of search.chatgpt.com and Sam Altman’s Q&A session at Stanford University are the things that have set the rumor mill in motion.
While he mostly talked about GPT5 and the free business model of his company, an event on May 9 was also said to be there with a launch, but not GPT5. Apparently, it could be the search engine.
Sam Altman’s take on making a search engine
Microsoft Bing is already using ChatGPT for its AI needs, and due to the partnership between the two firms, OpenAI now has access to search technology, which has been to some degree integrated into ChatGPT with the help of Bing, but it’s not a full-fledged search engine but rather an add-on. With Google still struggling to capture the AI-powered search market, there is much room for OpenAI to challenge it.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman is already sold on the idea of a relationship between search and his company’s technology and has said that search’s future could be ChatGPT. He said that no one has yet cracked the code on the intersection of LLMs and search, and it would be cool if he could do that.
During an interview with Lex Fridman, Altman said,
“If we can build a better search engine than Google, then we should.”
During the interview, Altman said that a lot of people have tried to build a better search engine than Google, but he said it’s a hard technical problem. He mentioned branding and the problem of ecosystem development. Altman’s remarks prove that Google has strong technology under its wing, but he also said that the world does not need another copy of Google. He even mocked Google; as he mentioned,
“Google shows you like 10 blue links—well, like 13 ads and then 10 blue links—and that’s like one way to find information. But the thing that’s exciting to me is not that we can go and build a better copy of Google search, but that maybe there’s just some much better way to help people find, act on, and synthesize information.”
Source: Lex Fridman.
The problem with ChatGPT’s language-based model is that outdated information is often not suitable for search results, which is because of the data the model is trained on before launching. But according to Toms guide the issue can be resolved by providing real-time web access to the model, with which the model can then generate a summary based on the results it fetches from the web in the same way that Perplexity, Google, and Bing are doing.