Microsoft now sees OpenAI as a competitor in AI and internet search
Now that OpenAI is testing its AI search engine, Microsoft is listing the ChatGPT developers as a competitor alongside Google and Meta. But they remain partners
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Microsoft and OpenAI are close partners. The software and cloud company has invested billions in artificial intelligence (AI) developers in order to secure exclusive and early access to the AI technologies developed by OpenAI. Cloud AI from OpenAI is only available from Microsoft's Azure. However, Microsoft now lists OpenAI as a competitor – alongside long-standing rivals such as Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta.
As part of its latest financial results, when Microsoft was able to announce growth in all areas, the company also submitted its results to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). In this mandatory disclosure, Microsoft lists a number of competitors, including Amazon, Google and Oracle in the cloud business. In the field of AI, OpenAI is also mentioned alongside Anthropic and Meta, but the AI developers are now also listed as competitors in web search and advertising.
One of the reasons may be that OpenAI is testing its own AI search engine SearchGPT. At the end of July, the AI company launched this AI search engine prototype, which is directly integrated into ChatGPT. However, the function can initially only be tried out by testers. Basically, it is an extension of the web search in the chatbot. Because it is a search function, the new crawlers from OpenAI access all websites.
Microsoft competitor because of SearchGPT
If SearchGPT is rolled out on a broad scale, OpenAI will become a direct competitor to search engines such as Google and Microsoft's Bing. The Windows group is the largest investor in the AI company. Microsoft already invested one billion in the AI start-up OpenAI in mid-2019. After the company introduced the interactive language model based on GPT-3 called ChatGPT at the end of 2022, bringing AI more into the public eye, Microsoft invested billions more in OpenAI at the beginning of 2023. The ChatGPT developers are said to have received a total of 13 billion US dollars from Microsoft.
However, the classification as a competitor does not change the relationship with Microsoft, an OpenAI spokesperson told CNBC. The partnership was entered into with the understanding that they would be competing. Microsoft remains a good partner for OpenAI, the spokesperson said. What Microsoft thinks about SearchGPT, for example, is not known, but as long as the cloud business continues to boom thanks to OpenAI, the software company is unlikely to change its relationship with the AI developers.
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