Microsoft Corp is bringing its Bing search engine to OpenAI Inc’s ChatGPT, further tightening ties with the artificial intelligence (AI) start-up in a bid to challenge Google.
Bing would be part of the premium ChatGPT Plus service starting yesterday, Microsoft said, and the search engine would come to the regular version of the chatbot soon.
Using Bing lets customers get up-to-the-minute information, whereas ChatGPT has been trained only on data through Sept. 20, 2021.
Photo: AP
Microsoft is OpenAI’s biggest investor and a key partner, giving it an edge in the race to weave artificial intelligence into more software products. The start-up, whose chatbot became a viral hit in the past year, has helped Microsoft attract customers to a cloud-based service that lets its Azure clients use OpenAI products.
Azure OpenAI has 4,500 customers, including Volvo AB, IKEA, Mercedes-Benz Group AG and Shell PLC. That is up from 2,500 customers at the end of last quarter.
Microsoft unveiled the Bing ChatGPT update yesterday at a developer conference in Seattle. Earlier this month, OpenAI started adding Web browsing as an optional capability to its paid Plus tier. That relied partly on Bing, although the arrangement was not disclosed at the time.
Microsoft chief executive officer Satya Nadella has been refocusing Microsoft’s products around AI programs called copilots — assistants that help users perform tasks in Bing and Office, as well as security and finance software, based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 technology.
The software maker is trying to boost sales, attract more cloud-computing business and better compete with Google in search. So far, the OpenAI partnership has helped Microsoft position itself at the forefront of a rapidly churning market for new types of AI tools.
With the proliferation of AI-generated information, Microsoft said it would watermark such content so people know it is not human-made.
The company also said it would make those same tools available to developers to use.
“We’re giving you a bunch of amazing media provenance tools that will help users understand when they are seeing generated content or not,” Microsoft chief technology officer Kevin Scott told attendees at the conference.
Scott did not elaborate on the technological underpinnings of these tools, except to say that they are “cryptographic” watermarks.
Microsoft is also letting outside software developers and companies write programs that tie into its OpenAI-based artificial intelligence software.
As part of that push, Instacart Inc, Redfin Corp, Zillow Group Inc and Kayak Software Corp would work with Bing’s AI, Microsoft said.
Meanwhile, Adobe Inc and Atlassian Corp would release features for Microsoft’s corporate AI software that can be used with the Office suite.
To let other companies write features and programs that make use of these AI products, OpenAI is allowing them to develop so-called plugins to work with ChatGPT.
Microsoft yesterday said that it would use a similar model. Companies and programmers can use the same plugins across ChatGPT and Microsoft’s own consumer and corporate AI software.
REASSURANCE: The company, which installed new equipment in its Taichung plant, said that it would produce 1-gamma nanometers node DRAMs in Taiwan in 2025 US-based memorychip supplier Micron Technology Inc on Friday said that it would start producing its most advanced DRAM exclusively in Taiwan in 2025. Micron said that it would mass produce chips using its advanced 1-gamma process node DRAM in Taiwan, ahead of any other production site worldwide. The company installed cutting-edge extreme ultraviolet (EUV) lithography production equipment in its A3 fab in Taichung last year. The 1-gamma process — its third-generation 10 nanometer-class node — was jointly developed by Micron’s research and development (R&D) teams in Taiwan and Japan. Micron on Thursday said it would invest up to US$3.6 billion in Japan. A Ministry
MARKET GAP: If China stops buying chips from US firm Micron, they might turn to competitors such as Nanya and South Korean suppliers, researchers said Nanya Technology Corp (南亞科技) shares rallied nearly 4 percent during early trading yesterday amid optimism that the nation’s biggest DRAM chipmaker would benefit from China’s latest ban on purchasing memory chips from Micron Technology Inc. The restrictions are widely considered a result of an escalating technology dispute between the US and China. Chinese firms might shift orders to non-US suppliers such as Nanya Technology and South Korean memory chipmakers Samsung Electronics Co and SK Hynix Inc. The Cyberspace Administration of China on Sunday night said that its review found that Micron’s memory chips pose serious network security risks to the country’s critical
SECURITY RISK: Chinese companies could respond to the announcement by moving away from all products made by the US firm, diverting business toward Korean rivals China delivered the latest salvo in an escalating semiconductor war with the US, announcing that Micron Technology Inc products have failed to pass a cybersecurity review in the country. Operators of key infrastructure in China should not buy the company’s goods, the Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC) said in a statement on Sunday, adding that it found “relatively serious” cybersecurity risks in Micron products sold in China. The components caused “significant security risks to our critical information infrastructure supply chain,” which would affect national security, it said. The results come more than a month after China announced an investigation on imports from
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) senior vice president of business development Kevin Zhang (張曉強) told reporters yesterday that talks over a possible plant in Germany are continuing and that the earliest decision would be in August. “I don’t want to get into the politics side of the thing, but I do think that there is a need for us to provide our customers with a diverse supply,” Zhang said, adding that Europe is a “very significant geography given the customer base ... [and] the demand.” Zhang did not confirm the size of subsidy or cost of the potential project or
RSS