Microsoft Is Reportedly Planning to Launch a ChatGPT-Powered Version of Bing

Microsoft is reportedly planning to integrate artificial intelligence behind ChatGPT, OpenAI's AI model capable of interacting in a conversational way, answering follow-up questions, and providing detailed responses to the input prompts, into its Bing search engine.

That's according to The Information which reported on Tuesday that the tech giant is preparing to launch a version of Bing that would be capable of answering search queries with the help of the technology behind the OpenAI-launched chatbot.

Citing two people familiar with the matter, the report claims that Microsoft could launch the new feature before the end of March and hopes to challenge the Google search engine as it believes that more conversational and contextual replies to users' queries would provide better-quality answers than just links to information that Google and similar search engines can provide.

According to Bloomberg's report, however, the company is still weighing the chatbot’s accuracy as well as how quickly it can be integrated into the search engine, so the initial launch of the feature might be a limited test to a small group of users.

OpenAI, which partnered with Microsoft in 2019 when the tech giant invested $1 billion in the AI research lab, made its ChatGPT chatbot available for free public testing on November 30, 2022. The application is capable of mimicking human-like conversation based on user prompts letting users create nearly everything they try it with including poems, books, rap battles, movie script outlines, and even Python scripts.

However, despite all of its "skills", the chatbot still has several disadvantages such as presenting incorrect information as a true fact, for example. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman warned users last month that it’s "a mistake to be relying on it for anything important."

Google itself is even cautious about launching its own AI chatbot LaMDA. While, according to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Google’s head of AI Jeff Dean, Google's AI language models are just as capable as OpenAI’s, the company has to move "more conservatively than a small startup" due to "reputational risk" posed by the technology.