Sam Altman says he doesn't think the world 'needs another copy of Google' because 'that's boring'

• OpenAI's Sam Altman isn't interested in beating Google at search.
• Building a better search engine than Google, Altman said, is "boring."

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he isn't interested in beating Google in the search business.

"I find that boring. I mean, if the question is if we can build a better search engine than Google or whatever, then sure, we should go, people should use the better product," Altman told podcaster Lex Fridman in an interview that aired Monday. "But I think that would so understate what this can be."

Altman made the remarks while responding to Fridman's comparisons between OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's search engine.

"The thing that's exciting to me is not that we can go build a better copy of Google search, but that maybe there's just some much better way to help people find and act on and synthesize information," Altman continued.

"I don't think the world needs another copy of Google," Altman told Fridman.

To be sure, Google hasn't ignored the threat posed by key players in the artificial intelligence market, like Altman's OpenAI. On Monday, Bloomberg reported that Apple was in talks to integrate Google's chatbot, Gemini, into the iPhone.

The tech giant's AI ambitions did take a hit last month after some social media users accused Gemini and its creators of being "woke." Google received multiple complaints that its chatbot consistently generated images of people of color in inaccurate historical contexts.

On February 22, Google said it was pausing Gemini's image-generation feature. The company said it would "re-release an improved version soon."

Representatives for OpenAI didn't immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider sent outside regular business hours.