Microsoft
supercharged its search engine
Bing
with AI features to better
compete with Google
Search. Recently, Perplexity AI also challenged Google's search business by raising funds from the likes of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, Nvidia, former YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki and Google AI’s Jeff Dean. There is reportedly another player – ChatGPT-maker
OpenAI
– that is preparing to compete with Google in this space.
According to a report by The Information, OpenAI has been quietly working on its own
web search service
that will essentially put the Microsoft-backed company in direct competition with Google. The outlet cited a source as saying that this search service will be partially powered by Bing – the search engine created by Microsoft.
An uphill task for OpenAI
Challenging Google in its own backyard will take some mettle. OpenAI does not have any experience in the search business. Microsoft has been on that path for multiple years (20 to precise, as per Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella) but hasn’t been able to hit Google’s dominance.
“At the end of the day, they [Google] are the 800-pound Gorilla on this,” he said in an interview. Nadella added that the company’s motive going early with AI features on Bing is to help companies innovate and with this, Microsoft “brought some competition to Search”.
Meanwhile, Perplexity AI is also shooting for the moon by introducing innovation into search. Google’s AI-powered Search and Gemini, and Microsoft Copilot-powered Bing, return results on the basis of training on a single large language model (LLM) to return best possible answers.
Perplexity says its search tools are powered by a variety of LLMs – from OpenAI to Meta's open-source model Llama – to generate information with sources and citations. As per Aravind Srinivas, chief executive at Perplexity, the startup's advantage lies in its focus and ability to fine-tune a variety of top-performing AI models instead of locking into one.
English (US) ·