Microsoft is hoping to steal people away from Google by incorporating machine learning into Bing.
A report from The Information (opens in new tab) (via the Verge (opens in new tab)) says that the tech behind the AI chatbot ChatGPT will be coming to Microsoft Bing in March. The hope is that this could give Bing a little more versatility outside of just ranking search results.
ChatGPT (opens in new tab) is an AI-powered chatbot capable of providing what some say are almost human-like long-form answers to open-ended questions. Microsoft had invested over $1 billion in AI company OpenAI back in 2019, and it seems that the technology giant is looking to capitalize on that investment and gain some ground on Google in the search engine space.
OpenAI is also behind the DALL-E image generator (opens in new tab) which Microsoft says is coming to Bing in the future as well.
So how will incorporating the AI behind ChatGPT improve Microsoft Bing? Well, I actually went ahead and asked ChatGPT to generate a response and here’s what it spit out.
“However, it is possible that incorporating ChatGPT or similar AI technology could be used to improve the natural language processing capabilities of Bing, potentially allowing it to better understand and respond to user queries written in natural language.”
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While that was a pretty good answer, in my time using ChatGPT, there were still a lot of problems. Too often in its responses, the AI gets a lot of information wrong (opens in new tab), and it can be a bit problematic (opens in new tab) too. A lot of it has to do with the AI having a “limited knowledge of world events after 2021,” according to the ChatGPT site. However, I’m more concerned about the bit that says that it “may occasionally produce harmful instructions or biased content.”
OpenAI released ChatGPT for public testing back in November. Microsoft is hoping to have an AI-powered version of Bing by the end of March. You can ask it to come up with essays about Star Wars, or make a top-ten list of the best videogames. It’ll be interesting to see how exactly Microsoft chooses to integrate this into Bing.
Oh and just for fun I asked ChatGPT to write a haiku about how bad Bing results can be and boy, it was a little sassy for an AI.
Search results so poor
Bing, you let me down once more
Better luck next time