Microsoft is incorporating ChatGPT-like technology into its Bing search engine, turning an internet service currently far behind Google into a new way of communicating with artificial intelligence.
Microsoft’s second-biggest search engine innovation could give the software giant a head start over other tech companies in capitalizing on the worldwide excitement surrounding ChatGPT, a tool that has awakened millions of people to the possibilities of the latest AI technology.
Along with adding it to Bing, Microsoft is also integrating chatbot technology into it Edge Browser. Microsoft announced the new technology at an event Tuesday at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington D.C.
Microsoft says the new Bing public preview will launch on Tuesday for users Who subscribe to it, but the technology will expand to millions of users in the next few weeks.
Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president and director of consumer marketing, said the new Bing will launch on desktop with limited previews. He says that everyone can try a limited number of queries.
An enhanced partnership with OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, has been in the making for many years, starting with a $1 billion investment from Microsoft in 2019 led to the development of a powerful supercomputer built specifically to train the San Francisco startup’s AI models.
While it’s not always practical or logical, ChatGPT’s linguistic and grammar prowess comes from having absorbed a huge library of digitized books, Wikipedia catalogs, manuals, press and other online articles.
The shift to making search engines more conversational — able to confidently answer questions rather than provide links to other sites — could change the business of search based on advertising, but also poses a risk if the AI system does not understand the truth. Their opacity also makes it difficult to retrieve the original man-made images and text that they have effectively memorized.
Google has been cautious about such moves. But under the pressure of ChatGPT’s popularity, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Monday a new conversation service called Bard that will be available exclusively to a group of “trusted testers” before being released to the general public later this year.
Google’s chatbot is said to be able to explain complex topics like the exploration of outer space in terms simple enough for a child to understand. It also claims that the service will also perform other mundane tasks, such as providing tips for planning a party or lunch ideas based on food left in the fridge. Other tech rivals such as Meta, the parent company of Facebook, and Amazon have also been working on similar technology, but Microsoft’s latest moves aim to position it at the center of the ChatGPT ideology. .
Microsoft revealed in January that it has poured billions more dollars into OpenAI as it looks to combine the technology behind ChatGPT, the DALL-E image generator, and other OpenAI innovations into a range of products. of Microsoft tied to their cloud computing platform and Office suite. workplace products such as email and spreadsheets.
The most surprising thing might be the integration with Bingis the second largest search engine in many markets but has never challenged Google’s dominant position.
Bing launched in 2009 as a rebrand of Microsoft’s previous search engines and was run for a time by Nadella, years before he took over as CEO. Its importance was enhanced when Yahoo and Microsoft signed an agreement to have Bing power Yahoo. search engine, giving Microsoft access to Yahoo’s larger search market share. Similar deals have included Bing in search features for devices made by other companies, even though users don’t necessarily know that Microsoft is supporting their search.
By making it a destination for chats like ChatGPT, Microsoft can invite more users to try Bing.
On the surface, at least, the Bing integration seems a far cry from what OpenAI had in mind for its technology.
OpenAI has long expressed an ambitious vision of securely guiding what is known as AGI, or artificial general intelligence, an unrealized concept rooted in ideas from science and technology. science fiction about human-like machines. OpenAI’s website describes AGIs as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at work of the most economic value”.
OpenAI started out as a non-profit research lab when it launched in December 2015 with the support of Tesla CEO Elon Musk and others. Its stated goal is “to advance digital intelligence in a way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, not constrained by the need to generate financial returns”.
That changed in 2018 when it incorporated the for-profit business Open AI LP and moved nearly all of its employees to the business, not long after releasing the first generation of its GPT model to create human-readable text.
Other OpenAI products include the DALL-E imager, originally released in 2021, the Codex computer programming assistant, and the Whisper speech recognition engine.
