According to the Intelligence Finance APP, OpenAI announced its search engine prototype, SearchGPT on Thursday, with the aim of providing users with "quick and timely answers and clear, relevant sources". This move marks the company's ambition in the search field, aiming to change people's search experience through a more natural and intuitive way.

Currently, SearchGPT is being tested among a small number of users, but OpenAI's ultimate plan is to integrate it into its popular ChatGPT chatbot. This strategy may pose a challenge to Google and its dominant search engine. Since ChatGPT's launch in November 2022, Google investors have been worried that OpenAI may seize Google's market share by offering new ways of online search information.

OpenAI promises that SearchGPT will allow users to search in a conversational way and propose follow-up questions, similar to talking to a human. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in an article, "We think there is still room for improvement in search capabilities."

The news has had a direct impact on Google, whose stock fell over 3% to close at $167.28 on Thursday, while the Nasdaq index fell less than 1%. In May of this year, Google launched AI Overview, which CEO Sundar Pichai described as the biggest change in the search field in 25 years. However, despite Google's year-long commitment to AI Overview, criticism of its AI functionality returning meaningless or inaccurate results has been increasing.

In addition to Google, Microsoft also said it has invited some Bing users to test AI summary features in search results. Microsoft says the feature uses generative AI and large language models (LLMs) in conjunction with search results pages to dynamically respond to user queries. According to Statista's latest data, Google continues to dominate the internet search competition, with 87% of all searches. Bing ranks second with 8% of the vote.

"Google has been a bit nervous since this thing was first exposed," said Daniel Faggella, founder and research director of Emerj AI Research, referring to generative AI. "We haven't seen the company implode during this time, but we see them fumbling a bit."

The announcement of SearchGPT came after OpenAI launched its new AI model, "GPT-4o mini", last week. The new model is a branch of GPT-4o, which is the fastest and most powerful model the start-up has ever produced.

Supported by Microsoft and valued at over $80 billion by investors, OpenAI was founded in 2015 and faces pressure to maintain its lead in the generative AI market while spending heavily on processors and infrastructure to build and train its models to find profitable ways.

Last month, OpenAI announced the hiring of two executives and a partnership with Apple, including the integration of ChatGPT-Siri. Sarah Friar, former CEO of Nextdoor and CFO of Square, was appointed as CFO, while former Planet Labs president, former Twitter senior vice president, and former Facebook and Instagram vice president Kevin Weil were appointed as chief product officer.

With the increasing importance of large language models throughout the tech industry and the rapidly intensifying competition in the emerging generative AI market, OpenAI is strengthening its executive team. The new mini AI model from OpenAI and the SearchGPT prototype are both part of the company's effort to stay ahead of the curve in "multimodal" technologies, or those that can offer multiple types of AI-generated media, such as text, images, audio, video, and search: ChatGPT.

Regarding SearchGPT, OpenAI's blog post states that the tool's visual results will bring users a "richer understanding". Last year, OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said, "The world is multimodal." He added that when people "interact with the world, we see things, hear things, and speak things," so limiting interactions to text is not enough.

With these measures, OpenAI is not only continuously innovating in technology but also actively laying out its strategy in an attempt to maintain its leading position in the fierce competition of generative AI.