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Microsoft on Tuesday announced a revamp of its Bing search engine and Edge web browser powered by artificial intelligence, weeks after it confirmed plans to invest billions in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT.
With the updates, Bing will not only provide a list of search results, but will also answer questions, chat with users and generate content in response to user queries, Microsoft said at a press event at its Redmond, Washington headquarters.
The updates come as the viral success of ChatGPT has sparked a wave of interest in AI chatbot tools. Multiple tech giants are now competing to deploy similar tools that could transform the way we draft e-mails, write essays and search for information online. A day before the event, Google announced plans to roll out its own artificial intelligence tool similar to ChatGPT in the coming weeks.
In partnership with OpenAI, Bing will run on a more powerful large language model than the one that underpins ChatGPT. These models are trained on vast troves of online data in order to generate responses to user prompts and queries.
“It’s a new paradigm for search, rapid innovation is going to come,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said during Tuesday’s event. “In fact, a race starts today … everyday we want to bring out new things, and most importantly, we want to have a lot of fun innovating in search because it’s high time.”
Microsoft also said the updated tools are expected to fuel its digital advertising business, by driving more users to its online search tools and increasing demand for ads on its platform.
The updated Bing is expected to be made available for the public to try on Tuesday for limited queries, with a small group of users having unlimited access. The company said full access will roll out to millions of users in the coming weeks, and it also hopes to implement the tools into other web browsers in the future.
Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI, said his company’s goal is “to make the benefits of AI to as many people as possible.” That, he said, is “why we worked with Microsoft.”
Microsoft, an early investor in OpenAI, said last month it plans to expand its existing partnership with the company as part of a greater effort to add more artificial intelligence to its suite of products. In a separate blog post, OpenAI said the multi-year investment will be used to “develop AI that is increasingly safe, useful, and powerful.”
“This technology is going to reshape pretty much every software category that we know,” Nadella said.
Microsoft’s incorporation of AI to its search engine comes a day after Google revealed details of its own new chatbot, Bard.
The move is by far the biggest threat Google has seen to its dominance in web search – and marks the beginning of an AI arms race between the companies.
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