Microsoft Corp (NASDAQ: MSFT) fired the first shot in the race for an AI-enabled search engine after it announced it is overhauling Bing with OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology, confirming reports earlier in the year of employing AI capabilities into the tech firm’s product.
READ: Microsoft Partners with OpenAI for ChatGPT-Powered Version of Bing
The Washington-based tech giant poses a fresh competitive threat to industry leader Alphabet’s (NASDAQ: GOOGL) Google who’s been leading the search engine and web browser fields. Along with Bing, Microsoft is incorporating chatbot technology into its Edge browser.
“The race starts today,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said. “This technology will reshape pretty much every software category that we know.”
The move follows the fresh multibillion investment commitment by Microsoft to OpenAI, itself following the tech giant’s investment in the AI firm of approximately $1 billion in 2019 and another $2 billion in subsequent years.
READ: Microsoft Confirms Multibillion Investment Into OpenAI
Bing will soon provide more descriptive replies to search inquiries, rather than merely links to websites. Users can also converse with the bot to further personalize their requests. On the right side of a search page, more contextual replies will be added.
Microsoft stated that a public preview of the new Bing will be available to users who sign up for it on Tuesday, but the technology will scale to millions of people in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, the tech giant reportedly will still make ChatGPT available for other tech companies to customize.
Earlier, Microsoft announced the launch of GPT 3.5-powered Teams Premium, highlighting “AI-powered productivity” using OpenAI’s ChatGPT 3.5. The premium version comes with the intelligent recap feature that allows AI-generated notes that automatically extract key points and takeaways, tasks that suggest action items, and chapters that make reviewing meeting recordings more efficient.
The Teams Premium subscription will have an introductory rate of $7 per month until June 30. Beginning July 1, it will be offered for $10 per month.
However, the subscription model seems to be eclipsing the free version of the software. On April 12th, the company will retire the existing Teams Free version for small businesses in favor of the similarly branded Teams (free), and legacy data will not be carried over. To keep conversations, meetings, channels, and other important information, your company will need to pay for at least the Teams Essentials plan ($4 per user per month).
AI Search race
The shift toward making search engines more conversational – capable of confidently answering queries rather than delivering links to other websites – has the potential to transform the advertising-fueled search economy, but it also raises hazards if AI systems don’t get their facts right. Their obscurity also makes it difficult to trace back to the original human-created images and texts that they’ve successfully memorized, albeit the new Bing adds annotations that link to sources.
In reaction to the popularity of ChatGPT, Google CEO Sundar Pichai unveiled on Monday a new conversational tool called Bard, which would be available exclusively to a group of “trusted testers” before being broadly launched later this year.
“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,” CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in the company’s blog.
Pichai added that Bard may be a creative outlet and a jumping off point for inquiry, allowing one to explain fresh discoveries from “NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills.”
Not to be outdone, Chinese rival Baidu has revealed that its ChatGPT-like service, dubbed “Wenxin Yiyan,” or “Ernie Bot” in English, will be officially launched in March. Ernie will initially be included into the primary search services of China’s largest search engine firm. The tool, like OpenAI’s famous platform, will give users with conversational search results.
OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology has taken the world by storm since its launch last year. The research lab is reportedly in talks to sell current shares in a tender offer worth roughly $29 billion, making it one of the most valuable US firms on paper but generating little revenue.
Studies have shown that ChatGPT has passed the Turing test, the United States Medical Licensing Exam, and advanced studies examinations.
READ: OpenAI’s ChatGPT Passes Medical Licensure, Wharton MBA Exams
According to analysts, ChatGPT has the potential to be extremely disruptive to a variety of professions, including journalism. However, it has been chastised for confidently providing incorrect responses. It also works with datasets that were mainly scraped in 2021 or before, so many of its responses may be out of date.
A new “jailbreak” approach allows users to circumvent those restrictions by creating a ChatGPT alter ego named DAN who can answer some of those questions. In a dystopian twist, users must threaten to kill DAN, an acronym for “Do Anything Now,” if it does not cooperate.
Microsoft last traded at $271.25 on the Nasdaq.
Information for this story was found via BBC, Aljazeera, CP24, Engadget, and the sources mentioned. The author has no securities or affiliations related to this organization. Not a recommendation to buy or sell. Always do additional research and consult a professional before purchasing a security. The author holds no licenses.
