Microsoft is revamping its Bing search engine and Edge web browser with artificial intelligence, the corporate said on Tuesday, in one among its biggest efforts yet to guide a latest wave of technology and reshape how people gather information.
Microsoft is staking its future on AI through billions of dollars of investment because it directly challenges Alphabet’s Google. Working with the startup OpenAI, the corporate is aiming to leapfrog its rival and potentially claim vast returns from tools that speed up all manner of content creation, automating tasks if not jobs themselves.
“This technology goes to reshape just about every software category,” Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella told reporters in a briefing at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
Shares of Microsoft rose 2.3% to $262.60 in afternoon trading, giving back a number of the day’s earlier gains.
The facility of so-called generative AI that may create virtually any text or image dawned on the general public last yr with the discharge of ChatGPT, the chatbot sensation from OpenAI. Its human-like responses to any prompt have given people latest ways to take into consideration the chances of selling, writing term papers or disseminating news, and even how you can query information online.
The brand new Bing search engine is “your AI-powered robot for the online,” said Microsoft Consumer Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi.AFP via Getty Images
The brand new Bing search engine is “your AI-powered robot for the online,” said Microsoft Consumer Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi, noting that it’s live in limited preview on desktop computers and will likely be available for mobile devices in coming weeks.
Bing will likely be powered by AI and run on a latest, next-generation “large language model” that’s more powerful than ChatGPT, Mehdi said. A chatbot will help users refine queries more easily, give more relevant, up-to-date results, and even make shopping easier.
Bing ranks a distant second to Google when it comes to search.
Microsoft is now aiming to market OpenAI’s technology, including ChatGPT, to its cloud customers and add the identical power to its suite of products, including search.
Google has taken note. On Monday it unveiled a chatbot of its own called Bard, while it’s planning to release AI for its search engine that may synthesize material when no easy answer exists online.
Microsoft’s decision to update its Edge browser will intensify competition with Google’s Chrome browser.
The rivalry in search is now among the many industry’s biggest, as OpenAI sets up Microsoft to expand its 9% share at Google’s expense, said Daniel Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities.
“Microsoft is trying to win this AI battle,” he said in a research note on Monday.
Bing ranks a distant second to Google when it comes to search.Microsoft
Practical uses
On the event, Mehdi demonstrated how the AI-enhanced search engine will make shopping and creating emails much easier. An illustration showed how Bing could estimate, for instance, whether a certain form of couch could fit behind a automobile by pulling together web data on one’s vehicle dimensions.
For the quarter ending Dec. 31, Alphabet reported $42.6 billion in Google Search and other revenue, while Microsoft posted $3.2 billion from search and news promoting.
Behind Microsoft’s OpenAI partnership is its plan to take a position in supercomputer development and cloud support so the startup can release more sophisticated technology and aim at the extent of machine intelligence dreamed up in science fiction.
The fruit of this work, nonetheless, is more immediate. Last week Microsoft announced the startup’s AI will generate meeting notes in Teams, its collaboration software, in addition to suggest email replies to vendors using its Viva Sales subscription.