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.
Taiwan’s exports soared 56 percent year-on-year to an all-time high of US$64.05 billion last month, propelled by surging global demand for artificial intelligence (AI), high-performance computing and cloud service infrastructure, the Ministry of Finance said yesterday. Department of Statistics Director-General Beatrice Tsai (蔡美娜) called the figure an unexpected upside surprise, citing a wave of technology orders from overseas customers alongside the usual year-end shopping season for technology products. Growth is likely to remain strong this month, she said, projecting a 40 percent to 45 percent expansion on an annual basis. The outperformance could prompt the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and
The demise of the coal industry left the US’ Appalachian region in tatters, with lost jobs, spoiled water and countless kilometers of abandoned underground mines. Now entrepreneurs are eyeing the rural region with ambitious visions to rebuild its economy by converting old mines into solar power systems and data centers that could help fuel the increasing power demands of the artificial intelligence (AI) boom. One such project is underway by a non-profit team calling itself Energy DELTA (Discovery, Education, Learning and Technology Accelerator) Lab, which is looking to develop energy sources on about 26,305 hectares of old coal land in
Netflix on Friday faced fierce criticism over its blockbuster deal to acquire Warner Bros Discovery. The streaming giant is already viewed as a pariah in some Hollywood circles, largely due to its reluctance to release content in theaters and its disruption of traditional industry practices. As Netflix emerged as the likely winning bidder for Warner Bros — the studio behind Casablanca, the Harry Potter movies and Friends — Hollywood’s elite launched an aggressive campaign against the acquisition. Titanic director James Cameron called the buyout a “disaster,” while a group of prominent producers are lobbying US Congress to oppose the deal,
Two Chinese chipmakers are attracting strong retail investor demand, buoyed by industry peer Moore Threads Technology Co’s (摩爾線程) stellar debut. The retail portion of MetaX Integrated Circuits (Shanghai) Co’s (上海沐曦) upcoming initial public offering (IPO) was 2,986 times oversubscribed on Friday, according to a filing. Meanwhile, Beijing Onmicro Electronics Co (北京昂瑞微), which makes radio frequency chips, was 2,899 times oversubscribed on Friday, its filing showed. The bids coincided with Moore Threads’ trading debut, which surged 425 percent on Friday after raising 8 billion yuan (US$1.13 billion) on bets that the company could emerge as a viable local competitor to Nvidia
RSS