Microsoft is baking ChatGPT-like technology into the Bing search engine

REDMOND, Wash. (AP) — Microsoft is merging ChatGPT-like technology with its Bing search engine, transforming an Internet service that now lags far behind Google into a new way of communicating using artificial intelligence.

The revamp of Microsoft’s second-ranked search engine could give the software giant a leg up on other tech companies by capitalizing on the global excitement surrounding ChatGPT, a tool that has awakened millions of people to the possibilities of the latest AI technology.

Besides adding it to Bing, Microsoft is also integrating chatbot technology into its Edge browser. Microsoft announced the new technology Tuesday at an event at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington.

Yusuf Mehdi, a Microsoft executive who heads the consumer division, said a public preview of the new Bing will begin Tuesday for desktop users who sign up for it, but the technology will scale to millions of users in the coming weeks. Anyone can try a limited number of queries, he said.

Strengthening the partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI has been years in the making, starting with a $1 billion investment by Microsoft in 2019 that led to the development of a powerful supercomputer purpose-built to train the startup’s AI models was built from San Francisco.

While not always factual or logical, ChatGPT’s command of language and grammar comes from absorbing a vast trove of digitized books, Wikipedia entries, instruction manuals, newspapers, and other writings online.

Microsoft Corp. CEO Satya Nadella said Tuesday new AI advances “will transform every software category we know,” including search, similar to previous innovations in personal computers and cloud computing. He said it’s important to develop AI “with human preferences and societal norms, and you’re not going to do that in a lab. You have to do that out in the world.”

The shift to more conversational search engines — capable of confidently answering questions rather than offering links to other sites — could transform the ad-driven search business, but it also poses risks if AI systems don’t get their facts right. Their opacity also makes it difficult to go back to the original human-made images and text, which they have effectively memorized, although the new Bing includes annotations that link to sources.

“Bing is powered by AI, so surprises and errors are possible,” reads a message that appears at the end of the preview of Bing’s new homepage. “Be sure to check the facts.”

As an example of how it works, Mehdi asked the new Bing to compare the most influential Mexican painters and it returned typical search results, but also compiled a fact box on the right side of the page that summarized details about Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo and Jose Clemente Orozco. In another example, he asked her about 1990s rap and showed her ability to differentiate between the song “Jump” by Kris Kross and “Jump Around” by House of Pain. And he used it to show how it can help plan a vacation or help with shopping.

Gartner analyst Jason Wong said new technological advances will mitigate what led to Microsoft’s disastrous launch of experimental chatbot Tay in 2016, which trained users to make racist and sexist remarks. But Wong said that “reputational risks will still be at the forefront for Microsoft” when Bing produces low-precision answers or so-called AI “hallucinations” that mix and match data.

Google has been cautious about such moves. But in response to pressure over ChatGPT’s popularity, Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Monday announced a new conversational service called Bard that will be available exclusively to a group of “trusted testers” before its general release later this year.

Wong said Google was surprised by ChatGPT’s success but still has an edge over Microsoft in consumer-facing technology, while Microsoft has an edge in selling its products to businesses.

Chinese tech giant Baidu also announced a similar search chatbot this week, which will launch later this year, according to Chinese media. Other tech rivals like Facebook parent Meta and Amazon have been researching similar technologies, but Microsoft’s latest moves aim to put them at the heart of the ChatGPT zeitgeist.

Microsoft announced in January that it was investing billions more dollars in OpenAI to fuse the technology behind ChatGPT, the image generator DALL-E, and other OpenAI innovations across a range of Microsoft products that are compatible with its cloud computing platform and his office suite are connected by workplace products like email and spreadsheets.

Perhaps most surprising is its integration with Bing, which is the number two search engine in many markets but has never come close to challenging Google’s dominant position.

Launched in 2009 as a rebrand of Microsoft’s previous search engines, Bing was run by Nadella for a time, years before he took over as CEO. Its importance increased when Yahoo and Microsoft signed a deal for Bing to power Yahoo’s search engine, giving Microsoft access to Yahoo’s larger search share. Similar offerings propelled Bing into search capabilities for other companies’ devices, although users wouldn’t necessarily know that Microsoft is pushing their searches.

By making it a destination for ChatGPT-like conversations, Microsoft could invite more users to try Bing, although the new version has so far been limited to desktops and doesn’t yet have an interface for smartphones – which is where most people now access the internet.

On the surface at least, a Bing integration seems very different than what OpenAI has in mind for its technology. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said at the Microsoft event that “the new Bing experience looks amazing” and is based in part on insights from the GPT suite of large language models. He said a key reason for his startup’s Microsoft partnership is to help bring OpenAI technology “into the hands of millions of people.”

OpenAI has long expressed an ambitious vision to safely control what is known as AGI, or artificial general intelligence, an as yet unrealized concept that dates back to science fiction ideas about human-like machines. OpenAI’s website describes AGI as “highly autonomous systems that outperform humans in the most economically valuable work”.

OpenAI began as a nonprofit research lab when it launched in December 2015 with support from Tesla CEO Elon Musk and others. His stated goal was to “advance digital intelligence in a way that most likely benefits humanity as a whole, unconstrained by the need to generate financial returns”.

That changed in 2018 when it formed a for-profit company Open AI LP and moved almost all of its employees into the business, not long after releasing its first generation GPT model for generating human-like paragraphs with human-readable text.

OpenAI’s other products include the image generator DALL-E, first released in 2021, the computer programming assistant Codex, and the speech recognition tool Whisper.

Matt O’brien, The Associated Press

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