I'm surprised that some people are surprised about this. To me, it seems obvious. It would've been very hard for OpenAI not to make this move. According to The Information, the majority of OpenAI's revenue is coming from B2C. On the other hand, Google still derives most of its revenue from Search Ads. Now, imagine you're OpenAI:
- You have one of the top-performing models, with companies like Perplexity building on top of your technology and growing in popularity, challenging Google.
- You have access to vast amounts of data through your crawlers.
Adding a search function with potential new revenue streams—not only from pro features like Perplexity but also from ad revenues in search terms—is an obvious, if somewhat delayed, move on OpenAI's part. The ability to target intent rather than just keywords makes this particularly valuable.
What's important to note, however, is this delay. It's also clear that OpenAI is under stress, being pressured from all sides by competitors like Anthropic and even open-weight models like the Llama series. They announced GPT-4's voice version almost two months ago, but it's still in closed beta. Another beta? Sora has yet to see the light of day, and every week a new video generation tool is coming out from both the West and East.
Any business without a moat will eventually get eaten. Now, OpenAI is "trying" to eat Perplexity (and similar companies). But the interesting fact is that OpenAI itself doesn't (yet) have a moat, which explains why they seem to be scrambling to find one.
