Redmond: Microsoft Corp. is revamping its Bing search engine and Edge web browser with artificial intelligence, the company said Tuesday, in one of its biggest hopes to lead a new wave of the technology and change the way people gather information. One of the efforts.
Microsoft is betting its future on AI through billions of dollars of investment as it directly challenges Alphabet Inc’s Google. Working with startup OpenAI, the company is aiming to leapfrog its rival and potentially claim huge returns from tools that speed up all kinds of content creation, automate tasks if done manually. Do not do job.
“This technology is going to reshape almost every software category,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told reporters at a briefing at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
Microsoft shares rose 2.3% to $262.60 in afternoon trading, giving back some of the earlier day’s gains.
The power of so-called generative AI that can create virtually any text or image dawned on the public last year with the release of ChatGPT, the chatbot sensation from OpenAI. Its human-like responses to any prompt have given people new ways of thinking about the possibilities of marketing, writing term papers or broadcasting news, or even how to query information online.
The new Bing search engine is “your AI-powered robot for the web,” Microsoft Consumer Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi said, noting that it’s live in limited preview on desktop computers and will be available for mobile devices in the coming weeks. .
Bing will be powered by AI and run on a new, next-generation “big language model” that is more powerful than ChatGPT, Mehdi said. A chatbot will help users refine questions more easily, deliver more relevant, up-to-date results, and even make purchases easier.
In terms of search, Bing is second only to Google.
Microsoft is now aiming to market OpenAI’s technology, including ChatGPT, to its cloud customers and add similar power to its suite of products, including search.
Google notes taken. On Monday it unveiled a chatbot of its own called Bard, while it plans to release AI for its search engine that can synthesize content when no simple answers exist online.
Microsoft’s decision to update its Edge browser will intensify competition with Google’s Chrome browser.
Daniel Ives, an analyst at Weinbush Securities, said the rivalry in search is now the industry’s biggest, as OpenAI sets up Microsoft to increase its 9% share at Google’s expense.
“Microsoft is looking to win this AI battle,” he said in a research note on Monday.
practical use
At the event, Mehdi demonstrated how an AI-enhanced search engine would make shopping and emailing easier. A demonstration showed how Bing could predict, for example, whether a particular type of couch would fit in the back of a car by pulling together web data on the dimensions of someone’s vehicle.
For the quarter ended December 31, Alphabet reported $42.6 billion in Google search and other revenue, while Microsoft posted $3.2 billion from search and news advertising.
Behind Microsoft’s OpenAI partnership are plans to invest in supercomputer development and cloud support so the startup can release more sophisticated 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 Teams, in its collaboration software, will generate meeting notes, as well as suggest email responses to salespeople using its Viva Sales subscription.
(Reporting by Jeffrey Dustin in Redmond, Wash. Editing by David Gaffen and Matthew Lewis)
Disclaimer: This report is generated automatically from Reuters news service. ThePrint is not responsible for its content.
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