Confirmed: Microsoft adding ChatGPT to Bing
But will it dethrone Google?
A new version of Microsoft's Bing search engine will incorporate ChatGPT AI technology.
That means the tool will be able to respond to queries directly, instead of just pointing users to a website.
The Bing overhaul, first rumoured last month, will be a direct threat to Google's search dominance.
As of December 2022, Bing only had about a 9% share of the search engine market, compared to Google's 84%.
Integrating ChatGPT, one of the world's fastest-growing web tools - it reached 1 million users in five days - into Bing represents the start of real, customer-facing AI competition between the tech giants.
"The race starts today," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the announcement yesterday.
Google, we can assume, will not play the tortoise for long - it is testing its own conversational AI tool, Bard, now.
"This [conversational AI] technology will reshape pretty much every software category that we know," Nadella said.
"We want to have a lot of fun innovating again in search, because it's high time."
As well as asking questions and queries, users will be able to chat with the new Bing to tailor its responses. Those contextualised answers will appear on the right-hand side of the page.
Unlike ChatGPT itself, which was limited to data ending in 2021, the new Bing can access up-to-date information. It runs on an upgraded version of GPT 3.5 that Microsoft calls the 'Prometheus Model'.
Interested parties can sign up to use the new Bing now, with each user getting a limited number of searches per day, all of which are currently pre-set.
The Bing evolution is just Microsoft's latest AI move. The company was an early investor in OpenAI, developer of ChatGPT, and is working to integrate the technology into other systems.
For example, a new premium Teams tier featuring ChatGPT will automatically generate notes and meeting highlights.
Microsoft is also integrating the technology into its Edge web browser with two new features called 'Chat' and 'Compose'.
People can use 'Chat' to summarise the contents of a web page and ask questions about the results. 'Compose', as its name implies, is designed to help users generate text like emails and social media posts from a few starting prompts.
Computing says:
This is an exciting moment for search engines, which really haven't seen much innovation - apart from on the adtech side - in years. There have been some attempts to make voice search work, but nothing that would really impact the average user.
On top of that, the world's most popular search engine - Google - is regularly criticised for keeping its users in a walled garden of its own services. The market is ripe for disruption.
But is AI the way to do it? ChatGPT is already known for presenting incorrect answers as fact. In a world already struggling with (mis)information overload, this is a real problem.
Microsoft says it is already trying to get ahead of the issue, working to safeguard against risks like bias and 'jailbreaking' (tricking AI into disregarding filters that stop it from generating harmful content).
But at the same time, it's also getting ready for things to go sideways. The new Bing already holds a warning: "Let's learn together. Bing is powered by AI, so surprises and mistakes are possible. Make sure to check the facts, and share feedback so we can learn and improve!"
Will everyone check the facts? The subset of people who shout the loudest to "do your own research" are, we fear, the ones least likely to do so.