According to a new report in The Information on Tuesday, Microsoft is developing a new Artificially Intelligent version of its search engine Bing using the artificial intelligence engine which supports the OpenAI-launched chatbot ChatGPT. The outlet quoted two people with direct knowledge of the plans.
The San Francisco-based technology news website reported that Microsoft is hoping to challenge the market dominance of Alphabet-owned search engine Google with the new product, which may launch before the end of March.
Last year, Microsoft had announced it intended to utilize image-generation software from OpenAI, DALL-E 2, into Bing.
Both OpenAI and Microsoft had no comment on the report.
In 2019, Microsoft backed the San Francisco-based Artificial Intelligence developer OpenAI, giving the company $1 billion in funding, and forming a multi-year partnership which was designed to develop artificial intelligence supercomputing technologies which would utilize Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service.
On November 30th, OpenAI made the latest product to come out of that research, the ChatGPT chatbot, available to the public for free, for testing purposes. The chatbot mimics human conversation when given user prompts, and can respond to a large variety of questions using online data it has access to, while imitating natural human speech patterns.
Alphabet/Google has reportedly sounded a “Code Red” over the rise of AI chatbots, as they have the potential to replace Google’s endless pages of links in response to a search query, with a simple user question and chatbot answer.
According to a recent report in the New York Times, Google CEO Sundar Pichai has reportedly retasked Google leaders to “define Google’s AI strategy” and has “upended the work of numerous groups inside the company to respond to the threat that ChatGPT poses.”
Alphabet’s/Google’s fear is their present business model is almost entirely dependent on paid links and ads which are embeded in its search results. If the search engine goes the way of the buggy whip, being replaced by a simple question and answer AI-chatbot, Google’s primary business model could be eliminated entirely, overnight.
