Microsoft integrates ChatGPT-Like Tech into Bing Search Engine

February 8, 2023

Last Updated Date: February 8, 2023

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Microsoft is incorporating technology that is similar to ChatGPT into its search engine Bing. This will change Bing, which is currently a distant second to Google in terms of internet services, into a new method of conversing with artificial intelligence.

The modernization of Microsoft’s second-place search engine could give the software giant an advantage over other technology companies in the race to capitalize on the worldwide excitement surrounding ChatGPT. ChatGPT is a tool that has opened the eyes of millions of people to the possibilities of the most recent AI technology.

The chatbot technology is not only being added to Bing by Microsoft, but the company is also incorporating it into its Edge browser. An event was held on Tuesday at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, when the company revealed the new technology.

Microsoft has announced that it will launch a public preview of the new Bing on Tuesday for people who have signed up for it; nevertheless, the technology will scale to support millions of users in the coming weeks.

According to Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president, and consumer chief marketing officer for Microsoft, the new Bing will enter limited preview mode on desktops before going live. According to what he mentioned, anyone can run a preset amount of searches.

The strengthening partnership with OpenAI, the company that developed ChatGPT, has been in the works for a number of years. It began with an investment of one billion dollars made by Microsoft in 2019 that led to the development of a powerful supercomputer that was specifically built to train the artificial intelligence models developed by the San Francisco startup.

Because it has digested such a large quantity of digitized books, Wikipedia pages, instruction manuals, newspapers, and other online writings, ChatGPT has a superior command of the English language and grammar, despite the fact that its output is not necessarily factual or logical.

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The Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft Corporation, Satya Nadella, stated on Tuesday that recent advancements in artificial intelligence are “going to reshape every software category we know,” including search, similarly to how earlier innovations in personal computers and cloud computing reshaped those fields. He emphasized the significance of the advancement of AI “with human tastes and societal standards, both of which are impossible to replicate in a laboratory setting. That can only be accomplished out in the real world.”

The move toward making search engines more conversational — that is, capable of confidently answering questions rather than offering links to other websites — has the potential to change the advertising-fueled search business, but it also poses risks if artificial intelligence systems don’t get their facts right. Although it is difficult to source back to the original human-made images and texts that they have effectively learned due to their opaqueness, the new Bing does provide annotations that link to sources.

According to Jason Wong, an analyst at Gartner, recent technology developments will offset the factors that contributed to the disastrous introduction of Microsoft’s experimental chatbot Tay in 2016. Tay was programmed by users to make racist and sexist comments. However, Wong stated that “reputational concerns will still be at the forefront” for Microsoft in the event that Bing delivers responses with low accuracy or so-called AI “hallucinations” that mix and conflate facts.

Regarding these kinds of measures, Google has taken a cautious approach. But in response to pressure over the popularity of ChatGPT, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Monday a new conversational service called Bard that will be available exclusively to a group of “trusted testers.” Bard will be available to “trusted testers” only “before being made available to a wider audience later on this year.

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According to Wong, Google was taken aback by the success of ChatGPT, but the company still maintains an advantage over Microsoft in terms of consumer-facing technology. On the other hand, Microsoft maintains an advantage when it comes to marketing its products to companies.

According to reports coming out of China, tech giant Baidu also made an announcement this week regarding a search chatbot that will be released later on in 2018. Although Microsoft’s competitors in the technology industry, such as Facebook’s parent company Meta and Amazon, have also worked on similar technology, the company’s most recent steps are designed to place it at the epicenter of the ChatGPT zeitgeist.

Microsoft disclosed in January that it was pouring billions of dollars more into OpenAI in order to accomplish its goal of incorporating the technology that is behind ChatGPT, the image-generator DALL-E, and other OpenAI innovations into a variety of Microsoft products that are connected to its cloud computing platform and its Office suite of workplace products such as email and spreadsheets.

The integration with Bing, which is the leading alternative search engine in many countries but has never come close to threatening Google’s preeminent position, may be the most surprising aspect of this development.

Nadella was responsible for the management of Bing for a period of time, many years before he became CEO of Microsoft. Bing was introduced in 2009 as a rebranding of Microsoft’s older search engines. Its significance was increased when Yahoo and Microsoft announced a contract for Bing to power Yahoo’s search engine. This gave Microsoft access to Yahoo’s larger search share, which in turn increased Yahoo’s significance. Users of products manufactured by other firms may not have been aware that Microsoft was the company powering their searches due to similar partnerships that integrated Bing into the search functionality of those products.

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Microsoft may be able to encourage more users to give Bing a shot if it is transformed into a destination for talks similar to ChatGPT.

At the very least on the surface, it would appear that what OpenAI has in mind for its technology is quite different from a connection with Bing. The Chief Executive Officer of OpenAI, Sam Altman, made an appearance at an event hosted by Microsoft. He stated that “the new Bing experience looks wonderful” and that it is built in part on the lessons learned from OpenAI’s GPT line of massive language models. He stated that one of the goals of the relationship with Microsoft is to assist in getting OpenAI technology “into the hands of millions of people.”

OpenAI has, for a long time, expressed an ambitious vision for securely leading what is known as AGI, or artificial general intelligence. AGI is a concept that has not yet been achieved but hearkens back to ideas from science fiction about machines that are similar to humans. On its website, OpenAI defines artificial general intelligence as “highly autonomous systems that outperform people at the task that is most economically valuable.”

When it first opened its doors in December 2015, OpenAI served as a nonprofit research laboratory. Elon Musk, CEO of Tesla, and a number of other individuals provided financial support. According to its mission statement, it wanted to “develop digital intelligence in a way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole, unencumbered by a requirement to earn a financial return.”

This changed in 2018, when it incorporated a for-profit business called Open AI LP, and moved nearly all of its staff into the business, not long after releasing its first generation of the GPT model for generating human-like paragraphs of a readable text. This was shortly after it had released its first version of the GPT model.

Other tools offered by OpenAI include the picture generator DALL-E, which was presented to the public for the first time in 2021, the computer programming assistant Codex, and the speech recognition tool Whisper.