This isn’t exactly unexpected. Microsoft (MSFT) today unveiled new versions of its Bing search engine and Edge browser powered by the newest artificial intelligence technology from ChatGPT maker OpenAI. Microsoft recently invested $10 billion in OpenAI.
“This technology is going to reshape pretty much every software category,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said Tuesday. It’s “high time” innovation was restored to internet search, he added.
Microsoft certainly hopes so. Alphabet’s (GOOG) Google search engine handled 92.2% of global search queries at the end of 2022. Bing’s market share? 3.42%. That was good enough for No. 2 in the search market ahead of Yahoo’s 1.23% share.
The new Bing, which runs on an OpenAI language model that is more advanced than the one behind ChatGPT, can be switched in and out of chat mode, Bloomberg reports. Users can tap the chatbot to compose emails. The new Edge browser adds the AI-based Bing for chat and writing text, and it can summarize web pages and respond conversationally to queries. The answers come with citations to their sources, so users can see where the information is coming from.
Microsoft said the new version of Bing is available now as a preview, which allows users a limited number of queries. People can also join a waitlist for full access in the coming weeks. I’d expect Open AI technology to show up in Microsofts Office software very soon.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google isn’t sitting still the company. The company has told developers that the ChatGPT challenge is a “code red” threat. And on Monday Google said its own conversational AI service, Bard, is opening up to trusted testers, and that the company is readying the service for the public “in the coming weeks.” Bard is based on LaMDA, Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications system. Alphabet has made its own investment in an outside AI company although it’s dwarfed by Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in OpenAI. Alphabet put almost $400 million into startup Anthropic, which is testing a ChatGPT rival called Claude, Bloomberg reports.
Alphabet is a member of my 50 Stocks Portfolio. Microsoft is a member of my 50 Stock, Jubak Picks, and Millennial portfolios.
