Microsoft is enhancing its Bing search engine and Edge web browser with artificial intelligence, the company said Tuesday, in a bid to lead a new wave of technology and reshape the way people gather information. One of the biggest efforts.
Microsoft is betting its future on AI by investing billions of dollars as it directly challenges Alphabet’s Google. Working with startup OpenAI, the company aims to leapfrog its rivals and potentially claim wider profits from tools that speed up all kinds of content creation, automating tasks if not self-employment. give
“This technology is going to reshape almost every software category,” Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella told reporters at a briefing at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
Shares of Microsoft rose 2.3% to $262.60 in afternoon trading, giving back some of the gains from earlier in the day.
The power of so-called generative AI that can create virtually any text or image came to the public last year with the launch of ChatGPT, a chatbot realization from OpenAI. Its human-like response to any prompt has given people new ways to think about marketing possibilities, writing term papers or disseminating news, or even querying information online.
Yusuf Mehdi, chief marketing officer for Microsoft Consumer, said the new Bing search engine is “your AI-powered robot for the web,” noting that it’s live in limited preview on desktop computers and in the coming weeks. Will be available for mobile devices.
Bing will be powered by AI and run on a new, next-generation “big language model” that is more powerful than ChatGPT, Mehdi said. Chatbots will help customers refine queries more easily, deliver more relevant, up-to-date results, and even make shopping easier.
Bing is second only to Google in terms of search.
Microsoft now plans to market OpenAI’s technology, including ChatGPT, to its cloud customers and add the same power to its suite of products, including search.
Google has taken notice. On Monday it unveiled a chatbot of its own called Bard, while it plans to release an AI for its search engine that can synthesize content when there are no easy answers online.
Microsoft’s decision to update its Edge browser will intensify competition with Google’s Chrome browser.
Wedbush Securities analyst Daniel Ives said the rivalry in search is now the biggest in the industry, as OpenAI sets up Microsoft to increase its 9% share at Google’s expense.
“Microsoft is looking to win this AI war,” he said in a research note on Monday.
Practical use
At the event, Mehdi showed how an AI-enhanced search engine will make shopping and emails a lot easier. A demonstration showed how Bing can predict, for example, whether a certain type of sofa can fit in the back of a car by gathering web data on the dimensions of someone’s car.
For the quarter ended Dec. 31, Alphabet reported $42.6 billion in Google search and other revenue, while Microsoft posted $3.2 billion from search and news ads.
Behind Microsoft’s OpenAI partnership is a plan to invest in supercomputer development and cloud support so the startup can release more cutting-edge technology and aim for the level of machine intelligence seen in science fiction.
However, the fruits of this work are more immediate. Last week Microsoft announced that the startup’s AI would generate meeting notes in teams, suggest email responses to vendors using its collaboration software as well as its Viva Sales subscription.
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