Sam Altman shoots down rumors of OpenAI search engine

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Contrary to rumors and a recent report, OpenAI will not be announcing an AI-powered search engine at an event on Monday, its CEO and co-founder Sam Altman announced via X on Friday.

Thew news was echoed on X by OpenAI president Greg Brockman.

However, the company did announce via its official corporate account on X that it would be streaming from its website live on Monday, May 13th starting at 10 am PT/1 pm ET to “to demo some ChatGPT and GPT-4 updates.”

On the OpenAI website, the top has been updated to contain a banner reading “Spring Updates” with a button that allows users to download a .ics calendar file and add the event to their own digital calendars on Outlook, Google Calendar, Apple Calendar, etc.

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Now the speculation has begun as to just what precisely OpenAI will announce, if not a search engine.

Many believe it will involve “agentic AI,” a term that’s quickly gained currency among AI industry types as relating to programs, or “AI agents,” built atop foundational AI models that can plan and carry out actions automatically on behalf of humans.

The automatic software developer application Devin, from startup Cognition, is one example of a powerful new AI agent built atop OpenAI’s GPT-4 Turbo model.

OpenAI last updated its long context and fast GPT-4 Turbo model and API in early April, retaking the title of most performant AI model in the world according to many third-party benchmarks, displacing the brief reign of rival Anthropic’s Claude 3 Opus which was unveiled the month prior.

Altman has also recently seemingly stoked the speculation that the mysterious “gpt2-chatbot” that appeared, disappeared, and reappeared on the web over the last two months is in fact, a new version of ChatGPT or analogous chatbot from OpenAI.

Perhaps the OpenAI event will feature it and explain more about what it is designed for…stay tuned. We’ll be covering the event live here on Monday.