OpenAI to announce ChatGPT product improvements Monday

ChatGPT-maker OpenAI plans to announce on Monday updates to its flagship chatbot as its most advanced AI model GPT-4, which "feels like magic," CEO Sam Altman said on X on Friday.

The company said on X that it will hold a livestream conference on Monday at 10am PT (1700 GMT) to "demo some updates to ChatGPT and GPT-4."

Reuters last week reported that the Microsoft -backed startup was planning an announcement Monday of an AI-powered search product one day ahead of Google's  I/O developers conference, citing sources.

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But the company decided to delay the search product announcement, according to one source familiar with the matter. On Friday, CEO Sam Altman posted on X, opens new tab that the announcement would be "not gpt-5, not a search engine, but we’ve been hard at work on some new stuff we think people will love! feels like magic to me."

OpenAI is under pressure to expand the user base of ChatGPT, its flagship chatbot product that wowed the world with its ability to produce humanlike written content and top-notch software code.

Shortly after launching in late 2022, ChatGPT was called the fastest application to ever reach 100 million monthly active users. However, worldwide traffic to ChatGPT's website has been on a roller-coaster ride in the past year and is only now returning to its May 2023 peak, according to analytics firm Similarweb.

Giving ChatGPT the search engine-like capability of accessing real-time, accurate web information is an obvious next step, and one that the current iteration of ChatGPT struggles with, industry experts have said.

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That would also put OpenAI in direct comPetition with Google, which has announced generative AI features for its own namesake search engine, and well-funded startup Perplexity, which has gained traction through providing an AI-native search interface that shows citations in results and images as well as text in its responses.

Weaving in real-time information has not been an easy task. An earlier attempt to bring updated and real-world information in to ChatGPT, called ChatGPT plugins, was retired in April, according to a help center posting on OpenAI's website.