OpenAI was reported to be working on a search engine that would directly challenge Google. But the missing details in the report raise questions about whether OpenAI is creating a standalone search engine or whether there’s another reason for the announcement.
OpenAI Web Search Report
The report published on The information reports that OpenAI is developing a web search product that will compete directly with Google. A key detail of the report is that it will be powered in part by Bing, Microsoft’s search engine. Other than that, there are no other details, including whether it will be a standalone search engine or integrated into ChatGPT.
All reports point to it being a direct challenge to Google, so let’s start there.
1. Is OpenAI assembly a challenge for Google?
OpenAI is said to use Bing Search as part of the rumored search engine, a combination of a GPT-4 with Bing Search, plus something in the middle to coordinate between the two.
In this scenario, what OpenAI is not doing is developing its own search indexing technology, it uses Bing.
Then all that’s left for OpenAI to build a search engine is to figure out how the search interface interacts with GPT-4 and Bing.
And this is a problem that Bing has already solved using what Microsoft calls an orchestration layer. Bing Chat uses Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) to enhance responses by adding web search data to use as context for the responses that GPT-4 creates. To learn more about how orchestration and RAG work, watch Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott’s keynote at the Microsoft Build 2023 event at 31:45 minutes. here).
If OpenAI is creating a challenge for Google Search, what exactly does OpenAI have left to do that Microsoft isn’t already doing with Bing Chat? Bing is an experienced and mature search technology, an experience OpenAI lacks.
Is OpenAI challenging Google? A more plausible answer is that Bing is challenging Google using OpenAI as a proxy.
2. Does OpenAI have the momentum to challenge Google?
ChatGPT is the fastest growing app of all time, currently with around 180 million users, achieving in two months what took Facebook and Twitter years.
However, despite this advantage, Google’s lead is a steep hill for OpenAI to climb. Note that Google has approximately 3 a 4 billion users worldwide, absolutely eclipsing OpenAI’s 180 million.
Assuming that OpenAI’s 180 million users perform an average of 4 searches per day, the daily number of searches could reach 720 million searches per day.
statesman estimates that there are 6.3 million searches on Google per minute, which equates to more than 9 billion searches per day.
If OpenAI wants to compete, they will need to offer a useful product with a compelling reason to use it. For example, Google and Apple have a captive audience in an ecosystem of mobile devices that integrates them into the daily lives of their users, both at work and at home. It’s pretty clear that just building a search engine is not enough to compete.
Realistically, how can OpenAI achieve this level of ubiquity and utility?
OpenAI faces an uphill battle not only against Google, but also against Microsoft and Apple. If you count Internet of Things apps and gadgets, add Amazon to that list of competitors that already have a presence in billions of users’ daily lives.
OpenAI doesn’t have the drive to launch a search engine to compete with Google because it doesn’t have the ecosystem to support integration into users’ lives.
3. OpenAI has no experience in information retrieval
The search is formally known as Information Retrieval (IR) in research papers and patents. No amount of searching in the Arxiv.org research article repository will turn up articles written by OpenAI researchers related to information retrieval. The same can be said for patent research related to information retrieval (IR). OpenAI’s list of research papers also has no IR related studies.
Not that OpenAI is being secretive. OpenAI has a long history of publishing research papers on the technologies they are developing. Research on IR does not exist. So, if OpenAI really plans to challenge Google, where is the smoke from this fire?
It’s a fair guess that search isn’t something OpenAI is developing right now. There’s no indication that he’s even flirting with building a search engine, nothing.
4. Is the OpenAI search engine a Microsoft project?
There is substantial evidence that Microsoft is furiously investigating how to use LLMs as part of a search engine.
All of the following research papers are classified as belonging to the fields of information retrieval (also known as search), artificial intelligence, and natural language computing.
Here are some research articles from 2024 alone:
Enhancing Human Annotation: Leveraging Large Language Models and Efficient Batch Processing
It’s about using AI to rank search queries.
Extracting structured entities using large language models
This research paper discovers a way to extract structured information from unstructured text (such as web pages). It’s like converting a web page (unstructured data) into a machine-understandable format (structured data).
Improve text embeddings with large language models (PDF version here)
This research paper discusses a way to achieve high-quality text embeddings that can be used for information retrieval (IR). Text embedding refers to creating a representation of text in a way that algorithms can use to understand the semantic meanings and relationships between words.
The above research paper explains the use:
“Text embeddings are vector representations of natural language that encode their semantic information. They are widely used in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as information retrieval (IR), question answering, etc. In the field of IR, first-stage retrieval often relies on text embeddings to efficiently recall a small set of candidate documents from a large-scale corpus using approximate nearest neighbor search techniques” .
There is more Microsoft research related to search, but these are the ones specifically related to search along with large language models (like GPT-4.5).
Following the trail of breadcrumbs leads directly to Microsoft as the technology powering whatever search engine OpenAI is supposedly planning… if that rumor is true.
5. Is the rumor destined to steal the spotlight from Gemini?
The rumor that OpenAI is launching a competing search engine was published on February 14th. The next day, February 15, Google announced the launch of Twins 1.5after announcing Advanced Gemini on February 8.
Is it a coincidence that the OpenAI announcement completely overshadowed the Gemini announcement the next day? The timing is incredible.
At this point, the OpenAI search engine is just a rumor.
Featured image by Shutterstock/rafapress
[ad_2]
Source link
