Microsoft Corp., OpenAI’s largest investor, announced Tuesday that it will incorporate its Bing search engine into ChatGPT. Expanding the artificial intelligence chatbot’s capabilities from retrieving data to offering real-time information to consumers.
On Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled the Bing-informed chatbot at a developer conference in Seattle.
In March, ChatGPT debuted a “experimental model” that could search the Internet for more up-to-date information—that model. Which was exclusively available to ChatGPT Plus membership users, used Bing, though this was not mentioned at the time.
The Bing function will first be available exclusively to ChatGPT Plus users. A premium-tier service launched in February that costs $20 per month. But will eventually be available to the free version of the chatbot. Which only takes data from before September 2021.
Microsoft’s AI implementation in Bing has resulted in a 16% rise in traffic to a search engine that had hitherto struggled to compete meaningfully with Google. Google announced its own intention to integrate generative AI into Google searches at its annual developer conference in May. Google’s new Search Generative Experience (SGE) replaces the blue links that appear when a user searches on Google with a green box of text summarising an answer to the inquiry. Similar to the ChatGPT response format.
Microsoft announced a fresh $10 billion investment in OpenAI in January, building on previous investments in 2019 and 2021. To make Microsoft’s Azure the AI startup’s “exclusive” provider of cloud computing services. The strong collaboration has resulted in AI copilots, a feature based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 technology that assists users with activities in Microsoft apps such as Bing and Office.
AI, according to Microsoft founder Bill Gates, threatens to fundamentally upend technology behemoths like Google and Amazon: “Whoever wins the personal agent, that’s the big thing, because you’ll never go back to a search site, you’ll never go back to a productivity site, you’ll never go back to Amazon,” he said.