Sam Altman Dismisses Reports of OpenAI Search Engine Launch
OpenAI is not announcing an AI-powered search engine at Monday’s event, which is quite contrary to what expectations were due to the rumors.
No OpenAI search engine, for sure
The company’s co-founder and CEO, Sam Altman, has cleared the air in a post on X, rejecting the reports by media outlets. He wrote in a post that,
“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.”
Source: Sam Altman.
The top portion of the OpenAI website now shows a banner that reads “Spring Updates,” and there is a button below the text that provides an option for users to add the event to their calendars on Google, Apple, Outlook, or any suitable app.
The company has also said from its official X account that on Monday, May 13, it would be streaming live from its website starting at 10 a.m. PT to demo some ChatGPT and GPT-4 updates.
OpenAI’s president, Greg Brockman, also reaffirmed what Altman already said.
Previously, news outlets The Information and Bloomberg reported that the company is working on a search engine that will be powered by AI and Reuters reported that the company may debut the search product on Monday. Tom’s guide speculated on a possible GPT search engine to be revealed on May 9.
The speculations were also linked to Sam Altman’s interview, where he said that if they can develop a better search engine, then why shouldn’t they do it? In this case, OpenAI will be in direct competition with search giant Google and Perplexity, which is also an AI-based search product now worth $1 billion.
Observers are still speculating
But now news observers have turned their attention to other possible announcements.
Tech observers are making all types of speculations about what the new release could possibly be or what the company has to show, if it’s neither GPT5 nor the highly assumed search product.
Jake Rains, a creative lead at Sterling Comp, a tech solution provider, and host of the Ufo Snap podcast, said in an X post that it has to be amazing. He guessed that GPT 3.5 is no longer relevant with ChatGPT 4 Lite to replace it by moving to that tier, and agents might have a new feature possibly related to automation.
Rains also referred to a feature that is not much talked about: how one GPT feature could be integrated into another GPT feature or instance, and how it could be a game changer if it is reintroduced with significant changes.
He is referring to agentic AI, an idea that gained popularity in the artificial intelligence industry for programs, or AI agents, that are built over foundational AI models that can help automation as they can plan and execute actions automatically in place of humans.
Sam Altman has also triggered the speculations around the GPT2 chatbot, which has been a hide-and-seek game for the past two months and could be a potential version of ChatGPT, but these are all just speculations until confirmed.
