With Microsoft announcing it is making a multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, (the company behind ChatGPT) there is a lot of speculation that this will give Bing a huge advantage over Google's current search engine. Is it that simple though?
It is no secret that artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly becoming a key driver of innovation and growth in the tech industry. As such, many companies are looking for ways to leverage this powerful technology to improve their products and services. Microsoft has been investing heavily in AI research and development for several years now.
How can Microsoft use AI and more specifically ChatGPT to enhance its services? ChatGPT is known for its advanced natural language processing (NLP) capabilities, which enable it to understand and respond to human language in a way that is both accurate and natural sounding. This makes it an ideal candidate for integration into a wide range of Microsoft products and services.
One such product is Bing, the company's search engine. Bing has been losing ground to Google for several years now, and Microsoft has been looking for ways to improve its performance and relevance. ChatGPT's NLP capabilities could be integrated into Bing to make it more effective at understanding and responding to user queries. This could potentially make Bing a more relevant and useful search engine than Google, as it would be better able to understand the intent behind user queries and provide more accurate and relevant results. Microsoft can also use ChatGPT to improve Cortana, Dynamics 365, Azure, and more of its services but for this article, we will focus on Bing.
Since the announcement I have seen numerous articles and videos on how Bing will overthrow Google when it integrates ChatGPT etc etc. Not so fast... Google also has a very long history of investing in AI and has the resources available to compete, right? In 2014 Google acquired Deep Mind, a leading AI research lab. Google has also already offered a small number of people a chatbot that could rival CHATGPT, called LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications.
Google, OpenAI, and others develop their A.I. with large language models that rely on online information. If launched without due diligence they could share false statements and show racist, sexist, and other biased attitudes. Lily Lin, a spokeswoman for Google said in a statement, "We continue to test our AI technology internally to make sure it's helpful and safe, and we look forward to sharing more experiences externally soon".
Google's technology has lagged OpenAI's self-reported metrics when it comes to identifying content that is hateful, toxic, sexual, or violent, according to an analysis that Google compiled. In each category, Open AI bested Google tools.
Google's chief executive, Sundar Pichai, declared a "code red" for A.I. development at Google, and now intends to unveil more than 20 new products and demonstrate a version of Google with chatbot features this year, according to the New York Times.
This is a moment of significant vulnerability for Google. ChatGPT is a compelling new search experience and in my opinion, is so much better than Google's current search engine. But I'm not counting out Google yet.
We need to remember this is the beginning of the AI revolution. Over the next year, we will witness massive changes to the world brought about by amazing AI tools. ChatGPT may be the first to market but so was MySpace. I'm not yet convinced that Bing will knock out Google as the top resource for search, but it is possible. What do you think?