According to a report by The Information, Microsoft is purportedly planning to include OpenAI’s ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence (AI) question and answer service, into Bing, its search engine. The new feature is said to be a way for Microsoft to compete with Google’s search engine and potentially increase traffic and revenue for Bing.
How ChatGPT works
Owned by OpenAI, ChatGPT, is a natural language system that uses content from across the web to teach itself how to answer questions. It can respond to a variety of questions while mimicking human speaking styles, and is created to replicate human-like dialogue based on user suggestions.
Microsoft’s partnership with OpenAI
Microsoft plans to release a version of Bing that will respond to select search queries with ChatGPT’s artificial intelligence rather than just by listing links.
By the end of March, Microsoft plans to roll out this new feature in an effort to help Bing compete with Google’s search engine.
As part of a multi-year partnership to build AI supercomputing capabilities on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service, Microsoft invested $1 billion in San Francisco-based AI business OpenAI.
By integrating ChatGPT into Bing Search, Microsoft may be able to recoup some of its investment.
Potential impact on Google
Even though ChatGPT has been dubbed the “Google killer” by some, it is unlikely that it will really challenge Google’s dominance in the market for search engines.
In fact, Google has its own advanced AI and machine learning capabilities, and it has previously stated that it has ways to detect and neutralize AI-generated content.
This is true despite reports of a “code red” emergency regarding the perceived threat of ChatGPT and the potential for the rapid advancement of AI to kill search engines and SEO.
It is unclear how great of a threat ChatGPT will be to Google because there are technologies available to detect AI-generated content.
Final thoughts
It will be fascinating to see how the integration of ChatGPT into Bing affects searcher behavior and how it stacks up against Google’s search capabilities. This is an interesting development in the search engine market.
It is too soon to tell whether ChatGPT will have a significant impact on the search engine industry, but it is obvious that Microsoft is seeking for ways to compete with Google and increase traffic to Bing.