UNITED STATES: CEO Satya Nadella announced on Tuesday that Microsoft’s long-struggling Bing search engine would incorporate the potent powers of language-based artificial intelligence, ushering in what he called a new era for the online search.
“A new day for search has dawned… the competition begins today,” Using the technology developed by the creators of the AI bot ChatGPT, Nadella announced the beginning of what it thought would be an unprecedented challenge against Google’s two-decade dominance of the search engine market.
More than 100 million users have tested ChatGPT’s capabilities, receiving essays, speeches, or law exam results in seconds, much to the dismay of educators and school officials concerned about cheating. This has triggered a gold rush in artificial intelligence technology (AI).
By adding ChatGPT to Bing, Microsoft plans to replace the traditional list of links to other websites with ready-made answers from various sources.
Microsoft Vice President Yusuf Mehdi says, “When we added the AI model to our main search engine, we saw the biggest jump in relevance in 20 years.”
OpenAI, a startup based in California and founded in 2015, developed ChatGPT. Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 and has since negotiated a new multi-billion dollar contract with the business, with support from Elon Musk, among others.
Before ChatGPT suddenly appeared on the scene two months ago, any serious challenge to Google’s dominance seemed unthinkable. Search is Google’s biggest source of revenue.
Google’s search engine earns tens of billions of dollars in ad sales each quarter, making up more than two-thirds of the internet giant’s total revenue, with a market share of 84 per cent of all search engines worldwide. Bing held just 9% of the market’s share the year before.
Google reportedly thought that ChatGPT’s huge success was a “code red” threat to the company and moved teams to come up with a solution right away and speed up their work on AI.
Google said on Monday that it would be putting out its own version of ChatGPT, a bot called Bard that would also respond to requests almost immediately, before Microsoft’s launch because it was surprised by the sudden competition.
Chinese search engine giant Baidu announced on Tuesday that it was getting ready to release “Ernie Bot,” an AI-powered chatbot, although the exact launch date was not disclosed.
“We see this as the opening salvo in the Big Tech AI war, which is expected to shift into high gear in the coming months with Microsoft currently in the lead,” according to Wedbush Securities’ Dan Ives.
Even though big tech is in the middle of an arms race, ChatGPT and other bots like it still make mistakes, and it still needs to be clarified if generative AI can replace search as we know it completely.
Google has already made its search engine more conversational by adding quick links to the most frequently asked questions related to a search request.
Before ChatGPT was made public, OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 programme, which produces digital graphics in response to a simple instruction, wowed computer geeks.
Also Read: Google Announces ‘Bard’: AI-powered Chatbot to Compete against ChatGPT
