Microsoft announced Tuesday that it is revamping its Bing search engine and Edge web browser with artificial intelligence. It’s one of the biggest efforts to lead a new wave of technology and reshape how people collect information.
Microsoft is betting its future on AI through billions of dollars of investment, directly challenging Alphabet’s Google. Working with his startup OpenAI, the company has the potential to leapfrog its rivals, speed up all kinds of content creation, and make huge profits from tools that automate tasks, if not the jobs themselves.
Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft, said at a press conference at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
Microsoft shares rose 2.3% to $262.60 in afternoon trading, recapturing some of the gains earlier in the day.
The ability of so-called generative AI to create almost any text or image was made public last year with the release of ChatGPT, a chatbot sensation from OpenAI. Responding to any prompt like a human gives people new ways to think about marketing, writing term papers, disseminating news, and even querying information online.
The new Bing search engine is an “AI-powered robot for the web,” Microsoft consumer chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi said in a limited preview on desktop computers, and will be available on mobile devices in the coming weeks. says it will be
Bing is powered by AI and runs on a new next-generation “large scale language model” that is more powerful than ChatGPT, Mehdi said. Chatbots help users narrow down their queries more easily, provide more relevant and up-to-date results, and make shopping easier.
Bing ranks second wide behind Google in terms of search.
Microsoft now aims to pitch OpenAI’s technology, including ChatGPT, to cloud customers and add the same functionality to its suite of products, including search.
Google took notice. It plans to unveil its own chatbot called Bard on Monday and release AI for search engines that can synthesize material when there are no easy answers online.
Microsoft’s decision to update its Edge browser will increase competition from Google’s Chrome browser.
Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives says competition in search is currently one of the biggest in the industry as OpenAI is set to take on Microsoft’s 9% share at Google’s expense is.
“Microsoft aims to win this AI battle,” he said in a research note Monday.
practical use
At the event, Mehdi demonstrated how an AI-enhanced search engine can make shopping and writing emails easier. In a demonstration, for example, by collecting his web data on vehicle dimensions, he showed how Bing can estimate whether a particular type of sofa will fit in the back of a car.
For the quarter ended December 31, Alphabet reported $42.6 billion in Google search and other revenue, while Microsoft posted $3.2 billion from search and news advertising.
Behind Microsoft’s OpenAI partnership is a plan to invest in supercomputer development and cloud support so startups can release more sophisticated technology and aim for levels of machine intelligence dreamed of in science fiction. .
However, the result of this work is more direct. Microsoft announced last week that Microsoft’s AI will generate meeting minutes in Teams, the company’s collaboration software, and suggest email replies to vendors using a Viva Sales subscription.
