OpenAI's SearchGPT: More than Google, it might hurt Glean, the high-flying enterprise startup

OpenAI's SearchGPT: More than Google, it might hurt Glean, the high-flying enterprise startup

3+1 things about OpenAI’s foray into search business:

  1. OpenAI is piloting SearchGPT, its search engine.
  2. OpenAI training and inference costs could reach $7bn for 2024!
  3. OpenAI is set to lose $5bn this year (has runway of 12 months only) - the company has 1,500 employees, makes $2Bn from ChatGPT
  4. (Bonus) OpenAI is red-eyed focus on enterprise customers - giving them more control and administrative tools to make ChatGPT Enterprise the de-facto infra play in enterprise AI space.

SearchGPT

Essentially, the company is losing money and given how difficult is it to monetize (and retain) consumers, I’d like to believe that OpenAI will roll out Enterprise AI search in no time - for them, consumer search is a way to test how easy/difficult is it to work with a variety of data partners/publishers (with their own data formats) and apply the learnings in B2B.

Let me explain:

  1. SearchGPT Pilot

OpenAI's pilot of SearchGPT signals a strategic move into the search engine market. This initiative likely serves multiple purposes:

  • Testing the waters for a consumer-facing search product
  • Gathering data and insights on search behavior and patterns
  • Developing and refining algorithms for information retrieval and relevance