Microsoft on Tuesday announced a revamp of its Bing search engine and AI-powered Edge browser, weeks after confirming plans to invest billions in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
With the updates, Bing will not only provide a list of search results, but also answer questions, talk to users and generate content in response to queries made by the public, Microsoft said at a press event at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington. The event comes a day after Google announced plans to launch its own ChatGPT-like artificial intelligence tool in the coming weeks.
In partnership with OpenAI, Bing will run on a large and more powerful language model than the one underpinning the ChatGPT AI chatbot tool. These models are trained on vast online data to generate responses to user requests and queries.
“It’s a new paradigm for research, fast innovation will come,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella during Tuesday’s event. “Actually, a race starts today… every day we want to bring you new things, and most importantly, we want to have a lot of fun innovating in research because it’s time.”
Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, said his company’s goal is “to bring the benefits of AI to as many people as possible.” That, he said, is “why we work with Microsoft.”
Microsoft, an early investor in OpenAI, said last month that it plans to expand its existing partnership with the company as part of a larger effort to add more artificial intelligence to its product suite. In a separate blog post, OpenAI said the multi-year investment will be used to “develop increasingly safe, useful and powerful AI”.
“This technology is going to reshape virtually every category of software we know,” Nadella said Tuesday.
The tech giant has previously said it would incorporate ChatGPT into products, including its Azure cloud computing platform.
“While Bing currently only has about 9% of the search market, the further integration of this tool and unique ChatGPT algorithms into Microsoft’s search platform could result in major shifts in Google’s share and towards Redmond in the future,” Dan Ives, an analyst at Wedbush, said in an investor note on Monday about the upcoming event.
the new bing
With the new Bing, a user can search for TVs to buy in a new way. Once the results appear, the user can click through to the chat section and ask Bing for additional information, such as which TVs are best for gaming and which are the cheapest.
The tool can also create a vacation itinerary for a family in a given city and then generate an email with this itinerary for the user to send to their family. It can even translate the email into other languages if needed.
“With the answers, we go far beyond what search can do today,” said Yusuf Mehdi, vice president and director of consumer marketing at Microsoft.
Many have speculated that the AI technology behind ChatGPT could cause a major upheaval in the online search industry. In the two months since it was released to the public, the viral tool has been used to generate essays, stories and lyrics, and to answer a few questions that someone might have previously searched on Google or other search engines.
The immense attention on ChatGPT over the past few weeks has reportedly prompted Google management to declare a “code red” situation for its search business. On Monday, Google unveiled a new chatbot tool dubbed “Bard” in an apparent attempt to compete with ChatGPT’s viral success.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, said in a blog post that Bard will be open to “trusted testers” starting Monday, with plans to make it available to the public in the coming weeks.
“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our great language models… It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality answers,” wrote Pichai.
But while AI tools like ChatGPT are rapidly gaining traction among users and tech companies alike, they have also raised some concerns, including about their potential to perpetuate prejudice and spread misinformation.
Microsoft executives acknowledged the potential shortcomings of their new tool.
“We know we won’t be able to answer every question every time,” Mehdi said. “We also know that we’re going to make our share of mistakes, so we’ve added a quick feedback button at the top of every survey so you can give us feedback and we’ll learn.”
Source: CNN Brasil
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