Microsoft is really hoping you’ll be interested in using Bing after the company soups up the search engine with popular artificial intelligence tech ChatGPT. The tech company is reportedly rolling out the AI-supplemented search engine in just a few months.
According to The Information, Microsoft’s motivation for implementing ChatGPT is to better compete with Google while allowing Bing to give more humanlike answers to searches. Though details are scarce on how the AI will actually be used in the Bing software, ChatGPT’s role will likely be on the backend, meaning its presence will probably be relatively undetected by the human user. Microsoft is reportedly rolling out the new AI feature in March of this year.
Microsoft declined to comment on this story.
ChatGPT has enamored tech users far and wide since its mainstream breakout last year. The allure of ChatGPT is how effective it is at having a conversation, writing news articles, and planning holiday parties, and ChatGPT adds to the other AI tools that have sprung up in 2022, like LaMDA and DALL-E 2, both of which have faced their own share of problems. While the issues with ChatGPT aren’t completely apparent yet due to its novelty, the chat bot’s wildfire popularity, however, has perked up the ears of Big Tech.
Google has reportedly issued a company-wide “code red” over the meteoric rise of ChatGPT, which has the potential to disrupt Silicon Valley much the way the monolithic inventions like the iPhone did. Since ChatGPT is so good at creating coherent language, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has allegedly upended meetings to prioritize assessing how AI like ChatGPT could disrupt Google’s primary mode of business: searching things.
Still, there’s plenty of reason for skepticism when it comes to claims that ChatGPT or other chatbots like it will take over search engines anytime soon. OpenAI’s model still struggles with presenting factually correct answers and has at times made up or created bias and offensive responses.
Google is definitely feeling the heat as ChatGPT continues to make waves, and Microsoft’s move to fuel Bing with the AI chatbot could be a game changer. Google is apparently working on its own version of AI chatbots, but the company is treading lightly. But even if all of the kinks are worked out, it would still likely take time for millions of people to jump ship from their Google habit and hop over to Bing.
Updated 1/4/2023 12:30 p.m. ET: This article was updated to include Microsoft’s decision not to comment on our story.