Refuting reports of starting a new search engine or announcing GPT-5, Altman wrote in a post on X (formerly Twitter), “not gpt-5, not a search engine, but we’ve been hard at work on some new stuff we think people will love! feels like magic to me. monday 10am PT.”

A Reuters report on Thursday had claimed that OpenAI was planning to launch its AI-powered search engine on May 13, in a bid to give tough competition to Google and Perplexity AI. Notably, reports by Bloomberg and The Information had also made similar claims in the past, but had refrained from giving a fixed launch date.

What happens to the AI search engine race now? 

While OpenAI may not be launching a new search competitor to Google on May 13, there is still a very good chance that the company will launch a new search product at some point in the future. In fact, a report from The Verge earlier this week claimed that OpenAI has been aggressively poaching Google employees for a team that is working to deliver the search product soon.

Notably, since its global debut in late 2022, there has been speculation that OpenAI will challenge Google’s dominance in the search market. Perhaps sensing the upcoming battle, Google had also unveiled a new AI-powered experimental search engine for iOS and Android in 2023.

Apart from OpenAI, Google also faces competition from Perplexity, an AI startup with a valuation of over $1 billion. Perplexity’s AI search allows users to get direct answers to questions with citations in the results, along with images. The startup revealed earlier this year that it has more than 10 million monthly active users.

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Published: 11 May 2024, 06:26 AM IST