Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Tuesday that search powered by artificial intelligence is the most important thing to occur to his company within the nine years he’s been on the helm.
“I actually have not seen something like this since I’d say 2007-2008, when the cloud was just first coming out,” Nadella told CNBC’s Jon Fortt in an interview.
Microsoft invited reporters to its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, for an event that centered around recent AI-powered updates to the corporate’s Bing search engine and Edge browser. Bing, which is a distant second to Google in search, will now allow users to speak in a way that gives more detailed answers to queries.
The updates to Bing and Edge will launch Tuesday on desktop in a limited preview, meaning users will get a finite variety of queries to look throughout the initial period.
Nadella said search is a really profitable business so these developments reflect a giant opportunity for Microsoft.
“I’ve never ever felt this liberated when it comes to opportunity in the times ahead,” he told CNBC.
Microsoft’s event Tuesday follows the corporate’s January announcement regarding a multibillion-dollar investment in ChatGPT-maker OpenAI. The deal marks the third phase of the partnership between the 2 firms, after Microsoft’s previous investments in 2019 and 2021.
ChatGPT mechanically generates text based on written prompts in a fashion that is far more advanced and inventive than past chatbots. The online-based tool went viral after its debut in November. Tech executives and enterprise capitalists gushed about it on Twitter, even comparing it to Apple’s debut of the iPhone in 2007.
On Monday, Google announced an AI chatbot technology called Bard that may begin rolling out in the approaching weeks. Bard will compete directly with ChatGPT.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman attended Microsoft’s event Tuesday and confirmed that Microsoft incorporated a few of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 language technologies into Bing to enhance its capabilities.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman at Microsoft’s event
Jordan Novet | CNBC
“I feel like I have been waiting for this for 20 years, so I’m very joyful it’s here,” Altman said throughout the presentation.
Nadella was promoted to CEO in 2014 after running the corporate’s cloud business. He presided over Microsoft’s expensive and dangerous move from on-premises servers to cloud infrastructure. It turned out to be a large boon for a corporation that largely missed the transition to mobile computing.
Microsoft Azure, the centerpiece of the corporate’s cloud unit, is second to Amazon Web Services and ahead of Google within the cloud infrastructure market.
“You possibly can only be relevant in technology in the event you are adequate to see the waves of change after which to reorient your technology and innovation agenda and the business model agenda,” Nadella said. “We have undergone some very harsh ones. The last one we went through was obviously the mobile and cloud. We caught one, we missed one.”
— CNBC’s Jordan Novet contributed to this report.
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