Microsoft and OpenAI to challenge Google with a ChatGPT-Powered Bing

Tech giant Microsoft is said to be working with OpenAI to incorporate its ChatGPT software into the Bing search engine. According to The Information, two people with direct knowledge of the plans say that Microsoft is preparing to launch a version of its Bing search engine that uses the artificial intelligence behind ChatGPT to answer some search queries rather than just showing a list of links.

We had reported last month that Google was worried over the sudden rise of ChatGPT. A New York Times report said the management at Google has every employee’s hands on deck, indicating the seriousness with which they are approaching the situation.

Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 to focus on building a platform that OpenAI will use to create new AI technologies and deliver on the promise of artificial general intelligence. So it would seem that Microsoft would soon get a return on its investment.

The report says Microsoft hopes the new feature, which could launch before the end of March, will help it outflank Google, its much bigger search rival.

As of July 2022, online search engine Bing accounted for nearly 9% of the global search market, while market leader Google had a share of around 83%.

In a related story, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella who is currently visiting India, did a live demonstration of ChatGPT onstage while speaking at the Microsoft Future Ready Leadership Summit on Tuesday when he discussed the future of Cloud and artificial intelligence (AI).

ChatGPT, which stands for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, is a chatbot developed by OpenAI that optimizes language models for dialogue. The application is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 family of large language models, and is fine-tuned with both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques. It was released for public testing in November 2022.