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The company reportedly hopes to get an edge over Google by using ChatGPT, though the accuracy of the chatbot has faced scrutiny since its launch.
Microsoft is planning to upgrade its Bing search engine using OpenAI’s ChatGPT, an advanced chatbot that gives conversational-style answers to questions, according to a report by The Information.
The tech company hopes to launch a new version of Bing that utilises ChatGPT before the end of March, two sources with direct knowledge told The Information. Microsoft is making the move to try get an edge over Google, its search engine rival.
Bing is the second-most popular search engine in the world, with nearly 9pc of the market share last July according to Statista. However, Google outranks every other search engine by a massive amount, having nearly 84pc of the market share in the same month.
The company hopes that the more conversational tone of ChatGPT will help win over users by providing more detailed answers to their questions, a person familiar with the matter told Bloomberg.
Microsoft had already hinted at using AI to give Bing a boost last year. In a blog post last October, the company said it planned to add text-to-image software into the search engine’s image creator using OpenAI’s Dall-E 2.
The two companies have been in partnership since 2019, when Microsoft invested $1bn into OpenAI to help bring “secure, trustworthy and ethical” AI to serve the public, while focusing on constructing Azure AI supercomputing technologies.
ChatGPT is one of OpenAI’s latest creations, which was designed to respond to questions in a human-like way. The experimental chatbot is able to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes and challenge incorrect premises, according to OpenAI.
A public demo of the AI was released toward the end of 2022 and rapidly gathered attention, getting more than 1m users by 5 December.
However, while many users praised the experimental AI for its ability to respond to questions, some posted examples of the chatbot creating biased or racist content. Other examples showed the chatbot providing incorrect answers to questions.
Around the time ChatGPT crossed 1m users, Stack Overflow, a Q&A site for programmers, issued a temporary ban on answers created by the chatbot.
Stack Overflow claimed the number of correct answers created by ChatGPT was “too low” and that posting answers made by the AI could be “substantially harmful” to the site and its users. It is currently unclear if the ban will be lifted.
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