• OpenAI is set to announce upgrades to its AI products an evening before Google is expected to do the same for its own.
• The OpenAI Spring Updates event starts at 19:00 South African time on Tuesday, and can be streamed on the company’s official website.
• Reports tell that OpenAI will likely launch a rival to Google Search as well as an AI assistant like Microsoft Copilot.

It’s a battle of Big AI. Expect a lot of noise around Google and OpenAI and their respective and rival AI products over the next two days, as on the eve of Google’s I/O developer event tomorrow, is OpenAI’s own showcase in which the ChatGPT-creator is expected to unveil an AI-powered search engine that will compete directly with Google Search.

Like Google I/O, OpenAI will be livestreaming the event which it is calling “Spring Updates.” Officially, the company says the event is to “demo some ChatGPT and GPT-4 updates.” It is being streamed 10AM PT on Monday, 13th May.

For South Africans hoping to catch the event tonight, they can go to the OpenAI website at 19:00 CAT.

Google is expected to make a bevvy of AI-related announcements at tomorrow’s event, but these announcements could be overshadowed by whatever updates OpenAI has slated for tonight’s showcase.

We already saw how OpenAI’s Sora text-to-video generating model blew every other AI video generator in the works or available at that point completely out of the water. Perhaps OpenAI’s updates tonight could do the same to whatever Google is preparing for tomorrow.

According to reports, OpenAI’s upcoming search engine will be similar to what Bing Search offers, in it will give web-based results but with citations linking to websites and online articles. OpenAI could also announce a new multimodal assistant tonight similar to the likes of Copilot, one that could generate images, identify and translate real-world images and more.

While it is unlikely that whatever OpenAI reveals in terms of search tonight will ever manage to beat the ubiquity of Google Search, but it could make a dent in it given enough time, and if the product is useful enough. We all saw just how quickly ChatGPT rocketed to popularity in the months following its release, becoming the fastest website to reach over 100 million monthly users ever.

As for where to go to watch Google I/O tomorrow, check here.

[Image – Photo by Solen Feyissa on Unsplash]