First To Arrive, Last To Leave: Is OpenAI Losing Out To Competitors?

The rules are simple: choose the correct answer in the shortest time possible. The quickest contestant earns the 'hot seat' and a shot at winning a million dollars.

The AI industry is experiencing a similar high-stakes race. Fewer competitors are developing large language models at breakneck speed, each striving to outdo the other. And investors are pouring millions of dollars their way to create these models. The competition is cut-throat.

Which is why when OpenAI announced Thursday a prototype of a search engine called SearchGPT, Google’s parent company Alphabet’s share dipped by over 3 per cent.

Currently in beta form, SearchGPT will be able to provide up-to-date information directly from the web, which ChatGPT (GPT-3.5) currently cannot do, with clear links to relevant sources. Which is also what Perplexity AI does, and is considerably good at.

SearchGPT: Google Search Killer?

OpenAI announced that they eventually plan to merge SearchGPT with ChatGPT, a move which could be detrimental to Google which currently enjoys an easy 91.05 per cent share of the search engine market.

Of course, ChatGPT, in its current form, doesn’t have an ad revenue model like Google does, where the search engine behemoth makes most of its money from. To put things into context, Google earned US$237.86 billion from advertising in 2023, up from US$224.47 billion the previous year, as per Statista.

Current web searches often lead to paywalls and pesky ads. Chatbots skip these ‘hassles’ for now, which is a bit of a controversial pitfall, but monetization is just around the corner.

The big bet? People just want straightforward answers without sifting through a bunch of search results. Perfect for simple questions, but complex topics might still trip up the bots. 

OpenAI said, “SearchGPT will quickly and directly respond to your questions with up-to-date information from the web while giving you clear links to relevant sources,” which is basically what a lot of the other AI models can do too.

But can SearchGPT be a serious competitor to Google’s flagship search engine? Can SearchGPT do what the likes of Yahoo, Bing or DuckDuckGo couldn’t?

SearchGPT Is Not A Novel AI Tool

Similar models have been hit-or-miss. Like Bing's new ‘generative search experience,’ which gives clear, up-to-date answers with links to sources, letting users refine their questions like a real conversation.

Another one is Google’s AI-powered ‘Overviews,’ which was first introduced in 2023 and is only available in the US. Perplexity AI is also a solid competitor but doesn’t have the deep pockets like Microsoft, Google and OpenAI do.

Since SearchGPT is still in beta phase and hasn’t been made available to the public, it’s hard to say if it is as big a game changer as it is touted to be. A similar thing happened with Sora as well. OpenAI announced the text-to-video model in February 2023 but hasn’t opened up the model to public use yet.

So, what happened in the time it’s taking to make its models public? Newer, better AI text-to-video models cropped up. Like Luma AI’s Dream Machine and Chinese company Kuaishou’s (one of the biggest competitors to TikTok) Kling AI. Both models broke the internet.

So, there’s naturally a growing question: Is OpenAI announcing unfinished models to maintain relevance in the fast-evolving AI industry?