The smart money is on the rumor that OpenAI was going to launch a search engine this month or next. That turned out to be false, and what they were really launching was GPT-4o; but it seems like Google believed the rumors and decided that they had to act first or risk being second place; unfortunately for Google, the gamble relied on “SearchGPT” (1) existing, and (2) being worse than SGE.
The smart money is on the rumor that OpenAI was going to launch a search engine this month or next. That turned out to be false, and what they were really launching was GPT-4o; but it seems like Google believed the rumors and decided that they had to act first or risk being second place; unfortunately for Google, the gamble relied on “SearchGPT” (1) existing, and (2) being worse than SGE.