A story from The Information says that Meta is working on an AI-powered search engine to become less reliant on Google and Microsoft. Reports say that the search engine would give AI-made recaps of current events in the Meta AI chatbot.

The Meta AI bot that is built into Instagram and Facebook currently uses Google and Microsoft Bing to answer questions about recent events and news. Alphabet, the parent company of Google, will report quarterly earnings tomorrow.

Meta’s web crawler was seen browsing the web months ago, so that might change in the future. It was told to The Information that a group has been working on a collection of information for its chatbot for about eight months. Meta has been collecting location data that could compete with Google Maps. And last month, Bloomberg said that Apple’s work on search tools in the App Store showed that the company “has what it needs” to make its own AI-powered Google Search alternative.

Meta also said last week that it had signed a multi-year deal with Reuters that lets its chatbot use news stories from the news source in its comments. Meta was asked to respond by The Verge, but they didn’t hear back right away.

If not, OpenAI has revealed that it is making an AI search engine called SearchGPT. At the same time, News Corp is suing Perplexity’s AI search engine, and other companies, including The New York Times, are also threatening to sue it.

Source: theverge