Microsoft adding ChatGPT to Bing to challenge Google, report
Microsoft could roll out the new feature before the end of March 2023
Microsoft is working to incorporate OpenAI's ChatGPT chatbot to its Bing search engine to make it smarter and able to challenge Google's much more widely use search engine.
Citing people with knowledge of the matter, The Information reported on Tuesday that Microsoft could roll out the new feature before the end of March.
The chatbot is a software program that can answer a wide variety of questions while emulating human speaking styles.
In 2019, Microsoft offered $1 billion in funding to San Francisco-based OpenAI, and since then the two companies have formed a multi-year partnership to build AI supercomputing capabilities on Microsoft's Azure cloud computing service.
OpenAI made the ChatGPT chatbot available for free public testing on November 30. Since then, ChatGPT has generated quite a bit of excitement as it can respond in a human-like manner to practically all questions. It is also capable of solving mathematical problems and analysing computer code.
Notably, last year Microsoft integrated technology from OpenAI's Dall-E 2 into Bing to let users generate images based on simple text inputs. With DALL-E 2, all the user has to do is to provide a text description, such as "a black cat using a mobile," and the program will generate an image based on the description in less than a minute.
DALL-E 2, represents a significant advance on previous graphics generators and can create the image in a wide range of artistic styles, from photorealistic art to abstract or cartoon-like graphics.
But in case of ChatGPT, OpenAI will need to address its limitations before Microsoft can integrate it to Bing. For example, ChatGPT's knowledge is restricted to events that occurred before 2021, and it often provides responses that are confident but incorrect.
Bing currently provides answers based on Wikipedia and other freely accessible data sources. Despite being bundled with Windows, Bing commands less than 4% of the global search market.
Google, on the other hand, is far better at responding to user queries, offering answers based on recently published articles; it is used for over 90% of global web searches. Nevertheless, Google can also mislead users, and many times it provides ambiguous responses or ones biased in accordance with its advertising model, and its popularity is dropping, albeit slowly and from a very high peak.
According to a New York Time s report last month, Google's management has declared ChatGPT a 'code red' and has asked its researchers to develop a AI-based platform that is comparable to ChatGPT.
The report said Google CEO Sundar Pichai has been in meetings to "define Google's AI strategy" and has instructed many groups within the company to refocus their efforts on addressing the threat that ChatGPT poses to its search engine business.