Microsoft will use the powerful capabilities of its Bing search engine artificial intelligence based on language, the head of the US computer giant, Satya Nadella, announced Tuesday, predicting what he called a “new era” for web searches.

“The race starts today,” said Microsoft’s CEO, referring to its rival Google, which has largely dominated the online search market for two decades and will now be challenged by the technology of the OpenAI-developed ChatGPT conversational robot, which is capable of to generate all kinds of texts based on user requests.

Microsoft’s announcement was expected since last year, when ChatGPT’s success outside tech circles made so-called “generative” artificial intelligence (AI) a fundamental trend.

The Internet “was born on PCs”, “evolved with mobile and the cloud”, and now artificial intelligence will “completely transform the web”, starting with searchesNadella assured during a press conference the subject of which was kept secret until the last moment.

Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019 and just signed another multi-billion dollar deal with the California-based startup founded in 2015.

Until then, this company was only known in private 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.

‘Second Pilot’

“We integrated the AI ​​model into our main search engine and saw the biggest increase in the number of relevant results in two decades,” said Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft vice president.

Mehdi showed how the new technology will transform Bing, specifically with direct answers to web users’ questions, rather than simple links to other pages on the web.

Mehdi compared the AI ​​to a ‘copilot’ for users, who can talk directly to the integrated chatbot.

OpenAI advances have brought Microsoft back into the innovation race, worrying rival Googlewhich reportedly stated that ChatGPT’s huge success was a threat to the company.

Google pre-empted Microsoft’s announcement on Monday, saying it was about to offer its own version of ChatGPT, a bot called Bard. who would also provide near-instant answers on request.

Last December, Google owned about 84% of the online search market, compared to Bing’s 9%, according to Statista. In a year, the Microsoft engine has eroded the industry giant’s supremacy by 2%.

“Further integration of ChatGPT and algorithms into Bing could shift the balance of power in this market in favor of Redmond in the future,” 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 “generate a variety of layouts instantly and with little effort,” Liat Ben-Zur, another Microsoft vice president, said in a press release.

“Anyone can be a maker with the right tools. Nearly 20 million US consumers create content online and earn an income,” he added.

Microsoft plans to integrate Designer into Edge, your internet browser is used much less 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 using OpenAI artificial intelligence.

And recently added GPT-3.5 to Team professional platform to make meetings “smart and personalized”, including automatically generated summaries.

This new strategy comes at a delicate time for Microsoft, which, like most major technology groups, recently announced a sizeable retirement plan: in mid-January it said it would lay off some 10,000 employees (nearly 5% of its workforce) by the end of March. from the company).