Alphabet Stock Slips 1%. A New AI Search Rival Could Be Around the Corner
Alphabet stock was slipping early Friday while the broader stock market was gaining. Stockholders might be nervous about a possible rival to the company's Google search engine from artificial-intelligence company OpenAI.Alphabet stock was down 0.7% in premarket trading. S&P 500 futures were up 0.3%.Microsoft-backed OpenAI is planning to unveil its AI-powered search product on Monday, Reuters reported, citing people familiar with the matter. It's a move that would bring the ChatGPT developer into much more direct competition with Alphabet's Google.So far, AI hasn't seemed to make much of an impression on the search-engine market despite the sector being targeted by companies such as Perplexity, an AI company backed by Nvidia and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. Issues around the reliability of AI-generated answers and the cost of carrying out queries have limited the technology's capacity to replace current search engines.Google has added a generative AI feature to its own standard search eng