OpenAI, the startup that kicked off the generative AI era with a massively popular chatbot, is set to reveal what it calls "Spring Updates" to its ChatGPT and GPT-4 models.

That'll take place in a livestream on Monday, the day before Google hosts its annual I/O conference, at which artificial intelligence will likely play a commanding role. Google has its own gen AI offerings, including the Gemini chatbot and what it calls Search Generative Experience.

Reports this week had suggested that OpenAI was planning to unveil a search product to rival offerings from both Google and the startup Perplexity, but OpenAI says that's not the case.

"We're not launching a search product or GPT-5 on Monday," a spokesperson said in an email.

Since ChatGPT debuted in November 2022, we've seen generative AI technology go mainstream as competitors like Adobe, Anthropic, Google, Meta, Microsoft and Perplexity introduced their own models and a chatbot arms race got underway. (Check out our reviews of those products, as well as other helpful advice and news, at our new AI Atlas hub.) As the models have improved, the tech companies behind them have teased functionality like sounds and even video games. But it's still anybody's game.

With all those companies, there's a consumer-facing chatbot or other interface, and an underlying AI technology. In the case of OpenAI, ChatGPT is the product you use, and a variously numbered GPT is the large language model that powers it.

It's been six months since the latest model, GPT-4 Turbo, was released. It provides more up-to-date responses than its predecessors and can understand — and generate — larger chunks of text.

That includes GPT-4, which came out in March 2023. It's available via the ChatGPT Plus subscription for $20 a month and uses 1 trillion parameters, or pieces of information, to process queries.

An even older version, GPT-3.5, is available for free but has a smaller context window. It uses 175 billion parameters.

In his review of GPT-3.5, CNET's Imad Khan calls ChatGPT 3.5 "user-friendly enough so that most people can still find value in it," but he cautions you to "keep your guard up and not to take ChatGPT's answers as absolute."

The livestream will be available on openai.com.

For now, it's anybody's guess when GPT-5 will make its debut — or what it will be capable of.

Editors' note: CNET used an AI engine to help create several dozen stories, which are labeled accordingly. The note you're reading is attached to articles that deal substantively with the topic of AI but are created entirely by our expert editors and writers. For more, see our AI policy.