The underlying technology that powers the new Bing will be more powerful than the core of ChatGPT, Microsoft executive Yusuf Mehdi said. Bing will have a “search” function and a “chat” function built into its homepage.
Microsoft’s move is sure to intensify the artificial intelligence arms race between the tech giants, which was reignited by the recent arrival of ChatGPT. That AI system can answer questions and generate human-like text, such as marketing copy or student essays, and became an instant hit with people outside the tech industry.
Google on Monday announced that it would release a chatbot named Bard, powered by its language model LaMDA, to the public in the coming weeks. The search giant also has an AI announcement planned Wednesday.
It’s a splashy move for Microsoft, which has for years remained a stalwart of business software and cloud computing, but hasn’t dominated in consumer-facing products such as social media. The company made a major investment in ChatGPT’s developer last month.
Microsoft will also incorporate the chat function into its browser, Edge, so it can be used to pull information and answer questions while users browse different webpages.
ChatGPT burst into public consciousness at the end of November and has already dazzled millions. Early adopters have used the text tool to write school essays and professional emails, to explain physics, and to spin up movie scripts, typing in random prompts to test the limits of its abilities.
The AI system is able to interpret a user’s question and generate human-like responses — language capabilities it developed by ingesting vast amounts of text scraped from the internet and finding patterns between words. The system’s developers, the San Francisco-based research lab OpenAI, built the chatbot by fine-tuning one of its older models, called GPT-3.5. Using feedback from human contractors, OpenAI finessed ChatGPT so that responses were more accurate, less offensive, and sounded more natural. Still, users found that ChatGPT sometimes confidently delivers inaccurate answers, spouts nonsense, repeats harmful racial bias, and can be manipulated to violate its own safety rules.
Both ChatGPT and GPT-3.5 are known as large language models, so-called for the massive amount of data they require. These models are part of a new wave of AI, including text-to-image generators DALL-E 2, which allow users to interact with the system using conversational English—no technical skills necessary. All have raised similar safety issues around misinformation and racial and gender bias.
