May 13 (Reuters) - ChatGPT maker OpenAI kicked off a livestream event on Monday where it has said it would announce updates to its flagship chatbot and its most advanced AI model, GPT-4.

The company on Friday said on social media platform X that it would "demo some updates to ChatGPT and GPT-4."

Reuters reported last week that the Microsoft -backed startup was planning an announcement on Monday of an AI-powered search product one day ahead of Google's I/O developers' conference, citing sources.

But OpenAI decided to delay the search product announcement, according to one source familiar with the matter. On Friday, CEO Sam Altman posted on X that the announcement would be "not gpt-5, not a search engine, but we’ve been hard at work on some new stuff we think people will love! feels like magic to me."

OpenAI is under pressure to expand the user base of ChatGPT, its popular chatbot product that wowed the world with its ability to produce human-like written content and top-notch software code.

Shortly after launching in late 2022, ChatGPT was called the fastest application to ever reach 100 million monthly active users. However, worldwide traffic to ChatGPT's website has been on a roller-coaster ride in the past year and is only now returning to its May 2023 peak, according to analytics firm Similarweb.

Giving ChatGPT the search engine-like capability of accessing and linking to up-to-date, accurate Web information and is an obvious next step, and one that the current iteration of ChatGPT struggles with, industry experts have said.

That would also put OpenAI in direct competition with Alphabet's Google, which has announced generative AI features for its own namesake search engine, and with well-funded startup Perplexity. The latter has gained traction through providing an AI-native search interface that shows citations in results and images as well as text in its responses.

Weaving in real-time information has not been an easy task. An earlier attempt to bring updated and real-time information in to ChatGPT, called ChatGPT plugins, was retired in April, according to a help center posting on OpenAI's website. (Reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco; and Akash Sriram in Bengalaru Additional reporting by Noel Randewich in Oakland, California Editing by Kenneth Li, Nick Zieminski and Matthew Lewis)