OpenAI has big news to share on May 13 – but it’s not announcing a search engine

OpenAI has announced it's got news to share via a public livestream on Monday, May 13 – but, contrary to previous rumors, the developer of ChatGPT and Dall-E apparently isn't going to use the online event  to launch a search engine.

In a social media post, OpenAI says that “some ChatGPT and GPT-4 updates” will be demoed at 10am PT / 1pm ET / 6pm BST on Monday May 13 (which is Tuesday, May 14 at 3am AEST for those of you in Australia). A livestream is going to be available.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman followed up by saying the big reveal isn't going to be GPT-5 and isn't going to be a search engine, so make of that what you will. “We've been hard at work on some new stuff we think people will love,” Altman says. “Feels like magic to me.”

Rumors that OpenAI would be taking on Google directly with its own search engine, possibly developed in partnership with Microsoft and Bing, have been swirling for months. It sounds like it's not ready yet though – so we'll have to wait.

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AI chatbots such as Microsoft Copilot already do a decent job of pulling up information from the web – indeed, at their core, these Large Language Models (LLMs) are essentially training themselves on websites in a similar way to how Google indexes them.

It's possible that the future of web search is not a list of links but rather an answer from an AI, based on those links – which raises the question of how websites could carry on getting the revenue they need to supply LLMs with information in the first place. Google itself has also been experimenting with AI in its search results.

In other OpenAI news, according to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, Apple has “closed in” on a deal to inject some ChatGPT smarts into iOS 18, due later this year. The companies are apparently now “finalizing terms” on the deal.

However, Gurman says that a deal between Apple and Google to use Google's Gemini AI engine is still on the table too. We know that Apple is planning to go big on AI this year, though it sounds as though it may need some help along the way.

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Apple rumored to be announcing major Siri updates at WWDC 2023

Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference for this year – WWDC 2023 – gets underway tomorrow, June 5. We've already heard plenty of rumors about what to expect, and it would seem that Apple's digital assistant Siri is in line for some major updates too.

According to well-known Apple tipster Mark Gurman (via MacRumors), there's a possibility that Apple will announce that the “hey Siri” phrase used to trigger Siri on iPhones and other devices is being shortened to simply “Siri”.

While this might not sound major from a user perspective, it has apparently required a significant amount of engineering work: accurately recognizing a single word rather than two words is a lot trickier, and Apple's AI engines have been updated to cope.

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Gurman first suggested this update was on the way back in November, though at the time it wasn't clear exactly when “hey Siri” would become simply “Siri”. Deeper Siri integrations with third-party apps and a better understanding of context have also been rumored.

At the moment, Google Assistant still requires a “hey Google” wake up command, though you can disable it for certain quick commands, and there has been talk of further changes here. As for Amazon Alexa, just an “Alexa” command is enough to get started.

We're expecting a whole host of software and hardware announcements at WWDC 2023 this year, including all the news about iOS 17 and a big reveal for the Apple VR headset – and of course you'll be able to read all about it here on TechRadar.


Analysis: expect yet more AI

Amidst the flurry of generative AI updates we've had in recent months, it's easy to forget that digital assistants like Siri have been around for many years now, with AI models leveraged to recognize and interpret voice commands from users.

At Google I/O 2023, Google seemed keen to remind everyone that it has a lot of artificial intelligence tools to show off, and the company has since been busy pushing more AI into more of its products – such as Google Messages.

We can probably expect the same from Apple at WWDC 2023: a look back at the AI that it's already been using, and a look forward to new innovations on the way. Siri, based on tech Apple acquired in 2010, is likely to play a big part in those new innovations.

AI is a hot topic at the moment, and we know that Apple isn't going to want to miss out or fall behind, whether that's with Siri or any of its other software: Google, OpenAI, Microsoft and others have set the pace, and Apple needs to catch up.

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