Bing, a search engine from Microsoft that now lags significantly behind Google, is being upgraded with ChatGPT-like technology to create a new channel for AI communication.
The redesign of Microsoft’s runner-up search engine might offer the software behemoth an edge over other tech firms in capitalizing on the global fervor around ChatGPT, a tool that has introduced millions of users to the potential of cutting-edge AI technology.
Microsoft is incorporating the chatbot technology into its Edge browser in addition to introducing it to Bing. At a gathering on Tuesday at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft unveiled the new technology.
Built using technology from ChatGPT-maker OpenAI but tailored for search queries, Yusuf Mehdi, a Microsoft official who oversees its consumer division, said in an interview, “Think of it as quicker, more accurate, more powerful” than ChatGPT.
Tuesday saw the debut of a public preview of the new Bing for desktop users who sign up for it, but according to Mehdi, the technology will expand to millions of people in the coming weeks and eventually appear in the Bing and Edge smartphone applications. Everyone may now attempt a certain amount of searches, he said.
Beginning with a $1 billion (approximately Rs. 8,300 crore) investment from Microsoft in 2019, which resulted in the building of a powerful supercomputer particularly tailored to train the AI models of the San Francisco firm, the growing cooperation with OpenAI has been in the works for years.
ChatGPT has mastered language and grammar by consuming a vast collection of digitized books, Wikipedia pages, instruction manuals, newspapers, and other online works, albeit it is not always accurate or logical.
In line with prior advancements in personal computers and cloud computing, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella stated on Tuesday that future AI developments are “going to change every software category we know,” including search. The development of AI “with human tastes and cultural conventions, and you’re not going to achieve it in a lab,” he added, is crucial. You must carry that out in the real world.
The move to making search engines more conversational, capable of confidently responding to queries rather simply providing links to other websites, has the potential to transform the advertising-driven search industry, but it also has hazards if the AI systems don’t get their facts straight. Although the new Bing contains comments that reference the underlying material, their opaqueness makes it difficult to trace them back to the original human-made pictures and sentences that they have successfully memorized.
The bottom of the preview of Bing’s new homepage has a disclaimer that reads, “Bing is driven by AI, so surprises and blunders are conceivable.” “Verify the facts, please.”
The move to making search engines more conversational, capable of confidently responding to queries rather simply providing links to other websites, has the potential to transform the advertising-driven search industry, but it also has hazards if the AI systems don’t get their facts straight. Although the new Bing contains comments that reference the underlying material, their opaqueness makes it difficult to trace them back to the original human-made pictures and sentences that they have successfully memorized.
The bottom of the preview of Bing’s new homepage has a disclaimer that reads, “Bing is driven by AI, so surprises and blunders are conceivable.” “Verify the facts, please.”
Gartner analyst Jason Wong said new technological advancements will mitigate what led to Microsoft’s disastrous 2016 launch of the experimental chatbot Tay, which users trained to spout racist and sexist remarks. But Wong said “reputational risks will still be at the forefront” for Microsoft if Bing produces answers with low accuracy or so-called AI “hallucinations” that mix and conflate data.
Google has been cautious about such moves. But in response to pressure over ChatGPT’s popularity, Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Monday announced a new conversational service named Bard that will be available exclusively to a group of “trusted testers” before being widely released later this year.
Wong said Google was caught off-guard with the success of ChatGPT but still has the advantage over Microsoft in consumer-facing technology, while Microsoft has the edge in selling its products to businesses.
Chinese tech giant Baidu also this week announced a similar search chatbot coming later this year, according to Chinese media. Other tech rivals such as Facebook parent Meta and Amazon have been researching similar technology, but Microsoft’s latest moves aim to position it at the centre of the ChatGPT zeitgeist.
Microsoft disclosed 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 launched in 2009 as a rebranding of Microsoft’s earlier search engines and was run for a time by Nadella, years before he took over as CEO. Its significance was boosted when Yahoo and Microsoft signed a deal for Bing to power Yahoo’s search engine, giving Microsoft access to Yahoo’s greater search share. Similar deals infused 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 limited to desktops and doesn’t yet have an interface for smartphones — where most people now access the internet.
On the surface, at least, a Bing integration seems far different from what OpenAI has in mind for its technology. Appearing at Microsoft’s event, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the “the new Bing experience looks fantastic” and is based in part on learnings from its GPT line of large language models. He said a key reason for his startup’s Microsoft partnership is to help get OpenAI technology “into the hands of millions of people.”
OpenAI has long voiced an ambitious vision for safely guiding what’s known as AGI, or artificial general intelligence, a not-yet-realised 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 started out as a nonprofit research laboratory when it launched in December 2015 with backing from Tesla CEO Elon Musk and others. Its stated 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.”
That changed in 2018 when it incorporated a for-profit business Open AI LP, and shifted 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 released in 2021, the computer programming assistant Codex and the speech recognition tool Whisper.
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