In a recent interview with podcaster Lex Fridman, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shared his views on the competition with Google in the search business, expressing a lack of interest in merely surpassing Google’s search capabilities. “I find that boring. I mean, if the question is if we can build a better search engine than Google or whatever, then sure, we should go, people should use the better product,” Altman remarked, emphasizing his desire to explore beyond traditional search functionalities.
He elaborated on his vision, stating, “The thing that’s exciting to me is not that we can go build a better copy of Google search, but that maybe there’s just some much better way to help people find and act on and synthesize information.“
Altman’s comments came as he discussed OpenAI’s ChatGPT in comparison to Google’s search engine with Fridman. “I don’t think the world needs another copy of Google,” he added, highlighting his ambition to innovate in the way information is accessed and utilized.
Despite Altman’s stance, it’s clear that Google is attentive to the evolving landscape of artificial intelligence, as evidenced by reports on Monday about Apple‘s discussions to incorporate Google’s chatbot, Gemini, into the iPhone. Google’s journey in the AI space has seen its challenges, notably when Gemini faced backlash from social media users for producing images of people of colour in historically inaccurate contexts. This controversy led to Google pausing the image-generation feature of Gemini on February 22, with promises to launch an improved version in the future.
OpenAI, under Altman’s leadership, seems poised to pursue a transformative approach to information technology, steering clear of creating mere alternatives to existing services. Representatives for OpenAI had not responded to inquiries about these developments at the time of this writing.
