Rumors and unconfirmed reports by other news outlets that OpenAI would reveal an AI-based search engine soon were dismissed by the company"s CEO and co-founder Sam Altman today.
Both Reuters and Bloomberg reported earlier this week that OpenAI was working on such a search engine. Reuters went further, stating the reveal would be made on Monday, May 13, starting at 10 am Pacific time (1 pm Eastern time)
Today, OpenAI did announce it will be streaming some announcements on May 13 related to ChatGPT and GPT-4 updates. However, Altman later posted a message on his own X (formerly Twitter) account that stated a search engine would not be among those announcements, nor would it be something related to GPT-5. He did say that OpenAI has "been hard at work on some new stuff we think people will love!" and he repeated the date and time for the reveal.
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.
— Sam Altman (@sama) May 10, 2024
monday 10am PT. https://t.co/nqftf6lRL1
The company, which has Microsoft as a large minority financial partner, has already been busy with a number of announcements so far in 2024. Its biggest announcement was the reveal of Sora, which can create animated videos just by typing in text prompts. OpenAI has been testing Sora with a private group of creators, but it has already stated it plans to launch the text-to-video tool to the general public sometime later in the year.
This week, during the Bloomberg Tech Conference, OpenAI"s chief operating officer Brad Lightcap was asked by Bloomberg’s Shirin Ghaffary if Sora got its training by using video from Google"s YouTube service. However, Lightcap dodged that specific question with a word salad answer.