“Google it” is no longer in Sam Altman’s vocabulary, or so he says.
The OpenAI CEO said in a recent dinner with reporters that it’s been a while since he last looked something up on Google, one of his company’s largest rivals in the AI race.
“I don’t use Google anymore. I legitimately cannot tell you the last time I did a Google search,” he said, as reported in The Verge’s Command Line newsletter.
It’s not hard to imagine Altman uses his company’s own product, ChatGPT, instead of Google.
While the companies are rivals on the AI front, OpenAI has recently enlisted Google Cloud, alongside other suppliers like Microsoft and Oracle, to help provide computational power for ChatGPT.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said he was “very excited” about the partnership on the company’s second-quarter earnings call last month.
“Google Cloud is an open platform, and we have a strong history of supporting great companies, startups, AI labs, etc.,” he said. “So super excited about our partnership there on the cloud side, and we look forward to investing more in that relationship and growing that.”
OpenAI recently debuted GPT-5, the latest model powering ChatGPT. Altman said it’d be free for everyone and that users would no longer need to toggle between previous models for different tasks.
He also called GPT-5 a “major upgrade” and “a significant step along the path of AGI,” saying that after using it, going back to GPT-4 was “miserable.” Backlash to the release, however, prompted OpenAI to make GPT-4o available again, showing just how dependent some users had become on it.
OpenAI and Google did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
