Senior Microsoft executives on Tuesday unveiled plans to use AI capabilities to improve its struggling online search engine Bing, and its internet browser Edge.
It’s hoping to offer more competition to market leader Google’s Search function and Chrome web browser.
The announcement comes as the new artificial intelligence writing program ChatGPT enjoys widespread public attention following its launch last November.
Microsoft had been a partner and 9% stakeholder of the OpenAI non-profit that created ChatGPT since 2019, but in late January it made another major investment in the group — reportedly as much as $10 billion (roughly €9.3 billion) — to increase that presence.
Its redoubled interest in OpenAI is thought to be a bid to counter some of the wider research operations of Google’s Alphabet Inc. parent company.
“This technology is going to reshape pretty much every software category,” Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella told reporters at the company’s headquarters in Redmond in the northwestern US state of Washington.
Microsoft said that a preview of the new Bing engine is already available for desktop users who sign up personally, and should be available to all on mobile devices in a matter of months.
Microsoft’s Consumer Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi called the revamped Bing “your AI-powered robot for the web.” He said Bing would be run on a new, next-generation “large language model” that is more powerful than ChatGPT.
Generative AI programs, including ChatGPT for the written word, can create all manner of images or texts on a range of topics at speed — based on collating a wealth of written and pictorial sources such as books, newspaper articles, encyclopedia entries, instruction manuals and other inputs. (DW)