By Clare Duffy, CNN
Microsoft on Tuesday announced a revamp of its Bing search engine and Edge web browser powered by artificial intelligence, weeks after it confirmed plans to invest billions in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
With the updates, Bing will not only provide a list of search results, but will also answer questions, chat with users and generate content in response to user queries, Microsoft said at a press event at its Redmond, Washington headquarters.
In partnership with OpenAI, Bing will run on a more powerful large language model than the one that underpins the AI chatbot tool ChatGPT. These models are trained on vast troves of online data in order to generate responses to user prompts and queries.
Microsoft to invest billions in AI startup behind ChatGPT for writing, image creation
‘Race starts today’
“It’s a new paradigm for search, rapid innovation is going to come,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during Tuesday’s event. “In fact, a race starts today … everyday we want to bring out new things, and most importantly, we want to have a lot of fun innovating in search because it’s high time.”
On Monday, Microsoft publicly confirmed the event shortly after its online search rival Google (GOOGL) announced plans to roll out its own artificial intelligence tool similar to ChatGPT in the coming weeks. Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, also tweeted a photo alongside Nadella on Monday with the caption: “Hello from Redmond! Excited for the event tomorrow.”
Microsoft, an early investor in OpenAI, said last month it plans to expand its existing partnership with the company as part of a greater effort to add more artificial intelligence to its suite of products. In a separate blog post, OpenAI said the multi-year investment will be used to “develop AI that is increasingly safe, useful, and powerful.”
“This technology is going to reshape pretty much every software category that we know,” Nadella said Tuesday.
The tech giant has already said it would incorporate ChatGPT into products, including its cloud computing platform Azure — and it is rumored to be planning to integrate the tool into its search engine, Bing.
“While Bing today only has roughly 9% of the search market, further integrating this unique ChatGPT tool and algorithms into the Microsoft search platform could result in major share shifts away from Google and towards Redmond down the road,” Dan Ives, an analyst with Wedbush, said in an investor note on Monday about the upcoming event.
Will AI disrupt online search industry?
Many have speculated the AI technology behind ChatGPT could cause a massive shake-up in the online search industry. In the two months since it launched to the public, the viral tool has been used to generate essays, stories and song lyrics, and to answer some questions one might previously have searched for on Google or other search engines.
The immense attention on ChatGPT in recent weeks reportedly prompted Google’s management to declare a “code red” situation for its search business. On Monday, Google unveiled a new chatbot tool dubbed “Bard” in an apparent bid to compete with the viral success of ChatGPT.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, said in a blog post that Bard will be opened up to “trusted testers” starting Monday, with plans to make it available to the public in the coming weeks.
“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models … It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses,” Pichai wrote.
But while AI tools like ChatGPT are rapidly gaining traction among both users and tech companies, they’ve also raised some concerns, including about their potential to perpetuate biases and spread misinformation.
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