Microsoft Adds ChatGPT AI Technology to Bing Search Engine

In an event to launch the technology on Tuesday, Microsoft said the Bing upgrade will enable a new kind of search in which people will pose questions to the search engine in natural language and it will generate direct answers.

Microsoft Chief Executive

Satya Nadella

told people gathered to watch a demonstration of the technology at the company’s Redmond, Wash., headquarters that it’s going to reshape most software categories.

Unlike ChatGPT, which wasn’t able to answer questions about current events, the updated Bing will have access to the latest information like news stories and train schedules.

Microsoft shares, which have climbed around 16% over the last three months compared to a rise of 13% of the Nasdaq Composite Index, were up around 2% on Tuesday.

Microsoft, which is investing billions of dollars into OpenAI, is integrating the technology into many of its products, marking what it pitches as a new era of AI-powered software that has the potential to upend power in the tech industry. Some analysts say AI-powered searches could help Microsoft’s Bing search engine take market share away from

Alphabet Inc.’s

Google, which controls around 90% of the market.

The industry has been buzzing about the possibilities of generative AI since OpenAI released its image generation tech Dall-E 2 to the public last year. Dall-E 2 can create original images based on simple prompts, such as, “Draw a robot dancing in a field of flowers.” OpenAI released ChatGPT in November. Millions of people have since used it to generate essays, sales pitches and poems.

The popularity of the tools has put pressure on Google, which has long been at the forefront of AI technology, to match it.

Earlier this week, Google announced it is rolling out its own conversational artificial-intelligence service to a set of testers and plans a broader public launch in the coming weeks. The new experimental service, called Bard, generates responses to questions posed by users, based on information drawn from the web,

Sundar Pichai,

chief executive of Google parent Alphabet, said in a blog post published Monday.

Shares of Chinese internet giant

Baidu Inc.

surged in Hong Kong Tuesday as it confirmed plans to launch an artificial-intelligence chatbot. Baidu said it expects to launch its AI chatbot, called Ernie Bot, in March.

Some artificial intelligence analysts warn there are still potential problems with generative AI. ChatGPT, for example, can be expensive to run and slow, and it sometimes produces responses that contain made-up facts, they have said.

OpenAI CEO

Sam Altman

has said that ChatGPT is an imperfect technology and that it would improve. “It’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now. it’s a preview of progress; we have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness,” he said in a December tweet.

The technology is proving powerful in some cases, such as when it is paired with professionals for specific tasks. Last year Microsoft released GitHub Copilot which uses OpenAI tools to help programmers write and fix computer code. Microsoft estimated that in files in which it is enabled, Copilot generates 40% of the code. The company last year also integrated OpenAI’s image-generation tech into its Bing and graphical design software Microsoft Designer.

As small startups and big corporations dive into using more of the data-heavy technology, Microsoft’s Azure cloud-computing business could benefit. Microsoft’s attempts to lead the shift to generative AI helps position Azure as the platform best suited for the job.

Write to Tom Dotan at [email protected]