Microsoft announced this Tuesday (7) that a new version of Bing, the company’s search engine, will use an artificial intelligence more powerful than ChatGPT, a robot that conquered millions of users in just two months.
Bing will be able to answer questions and talk to you based on information available on the internet. The changes also come to the company’s browser, Microsoft Edge.
The language model used is developed by OpenAI —the startup that created ChatGPT and received investments from Microsoft— and is optimized for web search.
The announcement comes a day after Google announced Bard, a text-generating robot to compete with ChatGPT, in what already looks like a race for conversational artificial intelligence.
“AI (artificial intelligence) will fundamentally change all types of software, starting with the greatest of all, search,” said Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, at the event.
Microsoft said that starting Tuesday, users will be able to make a limited number of queries to the new Bing through Edge and sign up for full access. The company predicts millions of users in the coming weeks and compatibility with smartphones and other browsers.
The new version of the search engine promises more complete answers. According to the company, Bing will be able to scour the internet to find and summarize the user’s search.
For example, the software can explain which ingredients can replace eggs in a cake recipe and suggest a travel itinerary only with places that are a three-hour flight from London.
Microsoft also said it has implemented ways to protect Bing from harmful content.
“Our teams are working to address issues such as misinformation, content blocking, data security and preventing the promotion of harmful or discriminatory content in line with our AI principles,” the company said on the official blog.
On Wednesday (2), Microsoft began offering a premium Teams offering based on ChatGPT, aimed at simplifying meetings. In addition to Teams and Bing, the company is expected to integrate AI into its other products, such as Office and Windows itself.
Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI was announced in January, but the partnership between the two lasts for almost four years – in 2019, big tech allocated US$ 1 billion to the startup co-founded by Elon Musk and Altman.
Bard, a Google tool announced this Monday (6), debuts on the market after the OpenAI chatbot conquered 100 million users in less than two months and dominated discussions on social networks. Altman, CEO of the startup said that, in just five days of operation, the robot got one million users.
“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our great language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality answers,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai, on the company’s blog, this Monday.
Google’s chatbot, however, is not yet available to the public, unlike ChatGPT. Big tech says the technology is under testing and should be made available in the coming weeks.
In the announcement, Google said that Bard will integrate the company’s search engine. According to the German consultancy Statista, the tool still dominates the market – it is used on 84% of computers, while Bing, on about 9%.
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