Microsoft is revamping its search products with more artificial intelligence, including the wildly popular ChatGPT, as tech companies race to take advantage of increasingly powerful AI tools.
The company said at a special event on Tuesday that it would work with OpenAI, the startup behind the ChatGPT tool, to improve its Bing search engine and Edge web browser, and to improve the information available.
The announcement came a day after Google revealed it is releasing its own artificial intelligence chatbot, called Bard, in response to the huge success of ChatGPT. Microsoft is betting on AI through billions of dollars of investment and is trying to capitalize on the worldwide excitement surrounding ChatGPT, a tool that has awakened millions of people to the possibilities of the latest AI technology, and is already changing how people gather information.
This technology is going to reshape pretty much every software category, said Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, in a briefing at Microsoft's headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
The move is intended to rival Google and claim huge returns from tools that speed up all manner of content creation, automating tasks and even automating jobs themselves. Microsoft's shares rose by 3.2% in the afternoon to $265.10 a share.
The release of ChatGPT last year brought the power of so-called generative AI that can create virtually any text or image. People have been given new ways to think about the possibilities of marketing, writing term papers or disseminating news, or even how to query information online because of the human-like responses to any prompt.
Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's consumer chief marketing officer, said at the briefing that the Bing search engine would be powered by AI and run on a new, next-generation large language model that is more powerful than ChatGPT. A chatbot will help users refine queries more easily, give more relevant, up-to-date results, and even make shopping easier.
Microsoft is aiming to market OpenAI's technology such as ChatGPT to its cloud customers and add the same power to its suite of products.
Google has taken note. On Monday it unveiled Bard, and the company is planning to release AI for its search engine that can synthesize material when no simple answer exists online.
Microsoft's decision to update its Edge browser will intensify competition with Google's Chrome browser.
Daniel Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities, said that the rivalry in the search is now among the biggest in the industry.
Microsoft is looking to win this AI battle, he said in a research note on Monday.