ONE BIG READ

OpenAI vs Google

Cast your mind back a few months. OpenAI was gearing up for its Spring Update event, and the rumor mill was working overtime to pump out leaks, speculations, and theories. One of the most persistent rumors was that of SearchGPT, an AI-fuelled competitor to Google. 

That rumor didn’t materialize at the time. Instead, we got a new flagship model called GPT-4o and some teasers for some pretty wild voice capabilities. Fast forward to today, and OpenAI is finally ready to pull back the curtain on SearchGPT. 

SearchGPT is exactly what it sounds like. It’s a search engine infused with a healthy dose of the company’s GPT AI technology. It’s billed as a potentially smarter, context-aware alternative to the long-dominant Google Search. When you first boot it up, you’ll be greeted with a large text box asking, “What are you looking for?” Once you give it an answer, the app will get to work searching, but rather than returning a list of results similar to Google, SearchGPT will try to organize, summarize, and make sense of them. 

In one example, a user searches for music festivals in California during the announcement video. Once the user hits enter, SearchGPT scans the web similar to how ChatGPT does and pulls in the closest music festivals, gives each one a quick summary of what to expect and follows them up with affiliate links.

Throughout the announcement, the company stresses that SearchGPT is still only a prototype and is not quite ready for mass adoption. It’s only opening to 10,000 test users at launch. Of course, it’s using OpenAI’s suite of GPT-4 language models, and according to one representative, the company is working with third-party partners with the goal of directly integrating search into ChatGPT. 

Check it out

PRODUCT HIGHLIGHT

Build entire apps in Airtable

Airtable is arguably one of the most influential product launches in the past ten years. What started as an alternative to spreadsheets quickly turned into a new way for makers and companies to quickly build apps without the need for code. Just take a look at the no-code category on Product Hunt, and you’ll see hundreds of apps using Airtable as a database. 

Now, the Airtable team is back with another launch that aims to make it even easier for users to build whatever app they need. No points for guessing that it’s AI. Cobuilder uses OpenAI’s GPT-4 family of models to handle all the heavy lifting of building apps within Airtable. What used to take potentially hours can now be done in minutes. 

It works by quickly analyzing the user’s role, the company they work for, and their specific prompt to make a number of API calls to a large-language model. For example, I could tell Airtable that I write the Product Hunt newsletter, and it could pull in data from the homepage about interesting products to write about. 

From there, it generates an app for a specific use case while adding specific features based on your profile. Once the app is generated, you can customize it further by changing the styling, updating the data, or adding features like a calendar, dashboard, gallery, etc. 

Build an app

AI IN THE HEADLINES

🍎 iOS 18.1 for developers has rolled out, and with it, Apple Intelligence (kind of).

💰 Perplexity plans to start sharing ad revenue with outlets cited by its chatbot.

🎨 Canva has acquired a new generative AI platform to bolster its own efforts in the space.

🤖 Google has made its Gemini chatbot faster and more generally available. 

🔍 Microsoft has unveiled its latest AI feature called Bing Generative Search.