Microsoft is fusing ChatGPT-like technology into its search engine Bing, transforming an internet service that now trails far behind Google into a new way of communicating with artificial intelligence.
The revamping of Microsoft’s second-place search engine could give the software giant a head start against other tech companies in capitalising on the worldwide excitement surrounding ChatGPT, a tool that’s awake millions of people to the possibilities of the latest AI technology.
Microsoft is also integrating the chatbot technology into its Edge browser.
Microsoft announce the new technology at an event at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
“Think of it as faster, more accurate, more powerful” than ChatGPT, built with technology from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI but tune for search queries, said Yusuf Mehdi, a Microsoft executive who leads its consumer division, in an interview.
A public preview of the new Bing launch for desktop users who sign up for it, but Mehdi said the technology will scale to millions of users in coming weeks and will eventually come to the smartphone apps for Bing and Edge.
As of now, everyone can try a limit number of queries, Yusuf Mehdi said.
The strengthening partnership with OpenAI has years in the making, starting with a $1 billion (approx. Rs. 8,300 crore) investment from Microsoft in 2019 that led to the development of a powerful supercomputer specifically built to train the San Francisco startup’s AI models.
While it’s not always factual or logical, ChatGPT’s mastery of language and grammar comes from having ingest a huge trove of digitised books, Wikipedia entries, instruction manuals, newspapers and other online writings.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said that new AI advances are “going to reshape every software category we know,” including search, much like earlier innovations in personal computers and cloud computing.
Satya Nadella said it is important to develop AI “with human preferences and societal norms and you’re not going to do that in a lab. You have to do that out in the world.”
The shift to making search engines more conversational, able to confidently answer questions rather than offering links to other websites, could change the advertising-fuel search business, but also poses risks if the AI systems don’t get their facts right.
Their opaqueness also makes it hard to source back to the original human-made images and texts they’ve effectively memorise, though the new Bing includes annotations that reference the source data.
“Bing is power by AI, so surprises and mistakes are possible,” is a message that appears at the bottom of the preview version of Bing’s new homepage. “Make sure to check the facts.”
As an example of how it works, Yusuf Mehdi ask the new Bing to compare the most influential Mexican painters and it provide typical search results, but also, on the right side of the page, compile a fact box summarising details about Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo and Jose Clemente Orozco.
In other example, Yusuf Mehdi quiz it on 1990s-era rap, showing its ability to distinguish between the song “Jump” by Kris Kross and “Jump Around” by House of Pain.
Yusuf Mehdi use it to show how it could plan a vacation or help with shopping.
Google has cautious about such moves.
But in response to pressure over ChatGPT’s popularity, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announce a new conversational service name Bard that will be available exclusively to a group of “trusted testers” before being widely release later this year.
Microsoft disclose in January that it was pouring billions more dollars into OpenAI as it looks to fuse the technology behind ChatGPT, the image-generator DALL-E and other OpenAI innovations into an array of Microsoft products tied to its cloud computing platform and its Office suite of workplace products like email and spreadsheets.
The most surprising might be the integration with Bing, which is the second-place search engine in many markets but has never come close to challenging Google’s dominant position.
Bing launch in 2009 as a rebranding of Microsoft’s earlier search engines and was run for a time by Satya Nadella, years before he took over as CEO.
Its significance was boost when Yahoo and Microsoft sign a deal for Bing to power Yahoo’s search engine, giving Microsoft access to Yahoo’s greater search share.
Similar deals infuse Bing into the search features for devices made by other companies, though users wouldn’t necessarily know that Microsoft was powering their searches.
By making it a destination for ChatGPT-like conversations, Microsoft could invite more users to give Bing a try, though the new version so far is limit to desktops and doesn’t yet have an interface for smartphones, where most people now access the internet.
A Bing integration seems far different from what OpenAI has in mind for its technology.
OpenAI has long voice an ambitious vision for safely guiding what’s known as AGI, or artificial general intelligence, a not-yet-realise concept that harkens back to ideas from science fiction about human-like machines.
OpenAI’s website describes AGI as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans at most economically valuable work.”
OpenAI start out as a nonprofit research laboratory when it launch in December 2015 with backing from Tesla CEO Elon Musk and others.
Its state aims were to “advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unconstrained by a need to generate financial return.”
Which change in 2018 when it incorporate a for-profit business Open AI LP, and shift nearly all its staff into the business, not long after releasing its first generation of the GPT model for generating human-like paragraphs of readable text.
OpenAI’s other products include the image-generator DALL-E, first release in 2021, the computer programming assistant Codex and the speech recognition tool Whisper.
