ChatGPT's next big challenge: Helping Microsoft to challenge Google search
Microsoft's $1 billion investment in OpenAI that helped produce ChatGPT could soon be used to improve its search engine, Bing, according to a story from The Information.
Bing could be getting ChatGPT-enhanced search capabilities as early as March in a move that capitalizes on Microsoft's $1 billion investment in Open AI in 2019, which included an exclusive multi-year cloud-computing partnership to build new Azure AI supercomputing technologies.
Also: What is ChatGPT and why does it matter? Here's what you need to know
Two sources with knowledge of Microsoft's plans told The Information that Microsoft is gearing up to launch a version of Bing that uses ChatGPT AI to answer some search queries, offering a different way of producing results than the list of links offered by Google Search and Bing. It could help change the status quo in the search market -- currently dominated by Google.
Also: The best AI art generators: DALL-E 2 and alternatives
Microsoft's investment in OpenAI aimed to support the startup's efforts to create Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), or a "a system capable of mastering a field of study to the world-expert level and mastering more fields than any one human."
ChatGPT is now arguably the highest profile chatbot that can respond to natural language prompts, and has captured more interest from the public than Google's own LaMDA or Language Model for Dialogue Applications conversational AI beta or Meta's BlenderBot. All three companies warn that the answers its chatbots deliver are unreliable. And Microsoft's Tay.ai chatbot spectacularly failed upon its public debut in 2016.
Stack Overflow in December temporarily banned ChatGPT-generated answers after users submitted ChatGPT answers to coding problems that looked plausibly correct but were actually bogus.
According to StatCounter, Google's worldwide market share of search is 92.5% compared to Bing's 3% and Yahoo's 1.24%.
The New York Times reported that ChatGPT's release prompted a "code red" from Google's management because of its potential to upend the decades-old, ad-sponsored search engine.
Microsoft is already using OpenAI technology to improve Bing. In December, it announced it was using OpenAI's DALL-E 2 image generator to let users create images based on keywords. It's not available in all regions yet and is in preview. Microsoft is reportedly planning to use ChatGPT to enhance Bing rather than change the underlying approach to search since GPT isn't designed to be a search engine that scrapes the web continuously.