Microsoft will integrate into its Bing search engine the powerful capabilities of artificial intelligence based on language, the head of the US computer giant, Satya Nadella, announced Tuesday, predicting what he called a “new era” for internet searches.
“The race starts today,” said the CEO of Microsoft, referring to his rival Google, which for two decades has largely dominated the online search market and will now be challenged by the technology of the ChatGPT conversational robot developed by OpenAI, capable of to generate all kinds of texts based on user requests.
Microsoft’s announcement has been expected since last year, when ChatGPT’s success beyond tech circles established so-called “generative” artificial intelligence (AI) as a fundamental trend.
The Internet “was born on personal computers”, “evolved with mobile and the cloud”, and now artificial intelligence “will completely transform the web”, starting with searchesassured Nadella during a press conference whose subject was kept secret until the last minute.
Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 and just closed a new multi-billion dollar deal with the California-based startup founded in 2015.
This company was until then known only in restricted circles for two automated creation software: DALL-E for image generation and GPT-3 for text generation.
ChatGPT, which is based on GPT-3, presents itself as a conversational robot and produces essays, poems or programming code in seconds.
‘Co-pilot’
“We integrated the AI model into our main search engine and have seen the most significant jump in the rate of relevant results in two decades,” said Yusuf Mehdi, a Microsoft vice president.
Mehdi showed how the new technology will transform Bing, in particular with direct answers to Internet users’ questions, instead of simple links to other pages on the web.
Mehdi likened the AI to a “copilot” for users, who can speak directly to the integrated chatbot.
OpenAI advances have put Microsoft back in the innovation race, worrying rival Googlewhich reportedly stated that the massive success of ChatGPT was a threat to the company.
Google preempted Microsoft’s announcement on Monday and said it was about to offer its own version of ChatGPT, a bot called Bard. which would also provide almost immediate responses on request.
Last December, Google owned about 84% of the online search market, compared to Bing’s 9%, according to Statista. In one year, the Microsoft engine has eroded the industry giant’s supremacy by 2%.
“Further integration of ChatGPT and algorithms into Bing could, in the future, shift the balance of power in this market in favor of Redmond,” said Wedbush analyst Dan Ives, referring to Redmond-based Microsoft in the northwestern United States.
Integration of technologies
Microsoft has already started integrating OpenAI technologies into its own tools.
In October, the company introduced Designer, new software based on DALL-E, the OpenAI image generator.
It should allow you to “instantly generate a variety of layouts with very little effort,” Liat Ben-Zur, another Microsoft vice president, said in a press release.
“Anyone can be a creator with the right tools. Nearly 20 million American consumers create content online and earn an income,” he added.
Microsoft plans to integrate Designer into Edge, your internet browser is much less used than Google’s Chrome or Apple’s Safari.
The Redmond group also developed Copilot, a paid service launched in June 2022 to help engineers generate computer code with the help of artificial intelligence from OpenAI.
And recently added GPT-3.5 to Team professional platform to make meetings more “smart and personalized”, including automatically generated summaries.
This new strategy takes place at a delicate moment for Microsoft which, like most of the large technology groups, recently announced a massive retirement plan: in mid-January it said that some 10,000 employees would be laid off by the end of March (almost 5% of the company’s workforce). (YO)
Source: Eluniverso
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