Microsoft integrates ChatGPT-like technology into its Bing search engine

Microsoft is advancing its pawns in its fight against Google in the internet search engine market. His boss, Satya Nadella, even mentions a ” new era “ with the announcement, Tuesday, February 7, of the integration into Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, of new AI technologies developed with the start-up OpenAI. The latter has launched the star software ChatGPT capable of generating all kinds of texts according to user requests.

It will soon be possible to ” discuss “ online with the new Bing, available only in test version for now. The objective is to provide more relevant and more complete results, with direct answers to questions from Internet users, in addition to links that refer to other pages on the web.

Above all, the new Bing includes a chatbot (conversational robot) capable of planning a three-day trip to Venice according to a given budget or of writing an e-mail according to the instructions of the user.

A billion dollar investment in OpenAI

“The race starts today”, said Satya Nadella, referring to Google, which largely dominates this market and which on Monday unveiled “Bard”, a competitor to ChatGPT. It’s a “co-pilot” but the Internet user remains in control, said Yusuf Mehdi, a vice-president of the Redmond group (northwest of the United States), during a press conference on Tuesday, the theme of which had been kept secret until at the last minute.

This new Microsoft product has been expected since last year, when the success of ChatGPT imposed the so-called AI “generative” as a fundamental trend. The inventor of Windows invested a billion dollars (930 million euros approximately) in OpenAI in 2019 and has just signed a new multi-billion agreement with the Californian start-up founded in 2015. This company was until there known only in restricted circles, for two software of automated creation, Dall-E for the generation of images and GPT-3 for the generation of texts (used in ChatGPT).

But with advances in OpenAI, Microsoft is getting back into the race for online innovation. Last December, Google held about 84% of the online search market, compared to 9% for Bing, according to Statista. In one year, the Microsoft engine has nibbled 2% from the sector giant.

“There needs to be innovation in online research because this technology is so important to humanity. And so we need competition.told Agence France-Presse Jordi Ribas, vice-president of Microsoft, who has been working on Bing for fifteen years. “That’s why I never got discouraged”. His team sought to find the right balance, knowing that ChatGPT is also known for its sometimes completely false answers, given with great aplomb.

“An extraordinary toy” to transform into a tool

“It’s an amazing toy, but it’s still a bit of a toy. The question was how to turn it into a tool that does not hallucinate (…) and that helps to accomplish tasks in minutes that used to take hours”he detailed.

Beyond the search engine, Microsoft also plans to transform Windows, its Office office suite and its services (collaborative tools, cloud, etc.). The process has already begun. In October, the company presented “Designer”, a software based in particular on Dall-E, for “Instantly generate a variety of designs with very little effort”according to Liat Ben-Zur, a vice-president of the group.

“Anyone can be a creator with the right tools. Nearly 20 million U.S. consumers create content online and earn revenue from it”, he then added, in a press release. Microsoft intends to integrate Designer into Edge, its internet browser much less used than Chrome (Google) or Safari (Apple).

The group has also developed Copilot, a paid service launched in June 2022 to help engineers generate computer code with the help of OpenAI AI. And recently, GPT-3.5 was added to the Teams business platform to make meetings more “intelligent and personalized”including automatically generated summaries.