OpenAI to Develop Search Tool: A Rivalry with Google?

If Google felt threatened by the arrival of ChatGPT, it must be recognized that the giant was able to defend itself. In early 2023, it unveiled Bard, a text generator and AI assistant, then launched Gemini, a multimodal generative AI model, at the end of the year. An obvious answer to GPT-4.

But today, The Information, citing an internal source at the start-up, reports that OpenAI is working on another product that could give Google a cold sweat: a search engine. Although we do not currently know the details of this solution, we can nevertheless make some hypotheses.

An integration with ChatGPT?

The web search tool could potentially be directly integrated into ChatGPT. OpenAI could also take the opportunity to make this service paid, either by integrating it with existing subscriptions, or in addition to what users already pay. It's also possible that it's a completely standalone service. While OpenAI has not confirmed anything, some sources claim that the company has been working on this project for over a year.

Recall that last March, OpenAI claimed to have implemented initial support for web plug-ins in ChatGPT, including an internally developed browser plug-in. A few months later, in September, the company announced that ChatGPT was now capable of browsing the web and presenting up-to-date information. A feature that relies on Bing, Microsoft's search engine.

ChatGPT gains memory

A few days ago, OpenAI also launched a memory function for its AI chat agent for testing. “We're testing ChatGPT's ability to remember the topics you discuss to make future chats more useful. This feature is rolling out to a small portion of Free and Plus users, and it's easy to enable or disable. disable”, the firm said.

It therefore remains to be seen how OpenAI intends to push its service and whether or not it will decide to rely on Microsoft, at the same time gaining users for the latter's ecosystem.