Microsoft said Tuesday that it will offer Bing as the default search engine in OpenAI’s viral ChatGPT chatbot.
It’s the latest tie-up between the two companies, which are at the center of the boom in generative artificial intelligence. Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI and uses the startup’s AI chatbot technology inside search, email, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets and now to analyze data.
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“This is just the beginning of what we plan to do with our partners in OpenAI to bring the best of Bing to the ChatGPT experience,” Microsoft CEO. Satya Nadella said on stage at Microsoft’s Build conference in Seattle on Tuesday.
In addition to cash, OpenAI relies on Microsoft’s Azure cloud for computing needs. At the same time, companies are taking over Googlewhich has developed its own generative AI models for search and other products and is also bet big in startups in space.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at an event at the company’s campus in Redmond, Washington, on February 7, 2023.
Chona Kasinger | Bloomberg | Getty Images
With the latest announcement, subscribers to the ChatGPT Plus service will be able to add Bing search by activating a plugin, Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s director of consumer marketing, wrote in a blog post. Users of ChatGPT’s free service will soon be able to do the same.
“ChatGPT will now have a world-class search engine built in to provide faster and more up-to-date answers accessed from the web,” Mehdi wrote. “Now ChatGPT responses can be informed by search and web data and include quotes so you can learn more – all right from the chat.”
Microsoft is trying to expand the use of Bing, which for years has struggled to take market share from Google. For every percentage point of search advertising share the company picks up, it would generate $2 billion in additional revenue, Microsoft CFO Amy Hood said in February.
Since ChatGPT became available in November, one of its limitations, according to critics, is that it has not been able to discuss recent events. The Bing chatbot, powered by OpenAI’s technology, that Microsoft announced in February was different because it could draw on current information to provide answers to typed questions.
OpenAI tried to extend the capabilities of ChatGPT when it notified the concept of plugins in March. Expediainstacart, Shopify and Slack are among the online services that have launched plugins, but there is a waiting list for others to join.
Microsoft said developers will be able to build plugins that work in ChatGPT, Bing and its Copilot chatbot coming to Microsoft 365 apps like Word and Excel.
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