REDMOND, Wash. Microsoft is revamping its Bing search engine and Edge web browser with artificial intelligence, the company said Tuesday, in one of its biggest efforts yet to lead a new wave of technology and reshape the way people gather information.
Microsoft is staking its future on AI through billions of dollars of investment as it directly challenges Alphabet Inc’s Google. Working with startup OpenAI, the company aims to outperform its rival and potentially claim big profits from the tools that speed up all kinds of content creation, automating tasks, if not jobs themselves.
“This technology is going to reshape virtually every category of software,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told reporters at a briefing at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
Microsoft shares rose 2.3% to $262.60 in afternoon trading, reversing some of the day’s earlier gains.
The power of so-called generative AI that can create virtually any text or image became apparent to the public last year with the release of ChatGPT, the chatbot sensation from OpenAI. Their human-like responses to any notice have given people new ways of thinking about the possibilities of marketing, writing jobs or spreading the news, or even how to find information online.
The new Bing search engine is «your AI-powered bot for the web,» said Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s director of consumer marketing, noting that it’s available in limited preview on desktop and will be available on mobile. In the next weeks.
Bing will be powered by AI and run on a new next-generation «big language model» that is more powerful than ChatGPT, Mehdi said. A chatbot will help users refine queries more easily, provide more relevant and up-to-date results, and even make shopping easier.
Bing is a distant second to Google in search terms.
Microsoft now aims to commercialize OpenAI’s technology, including ChatGPT, to its cloud customers and add the same power to its suite of products, including search.
Google has taken note. It was announced on Monday a chatbot of its own called Bard, while planning to release AI for its search engine that can synthesize material when there is no simple answer online.
Microsoft’s decision to update its Edge browser will intensify competition with Google’s Chrome browser.
The search rivalry is now among the biggest in the industry, as OpenAI sets Microsoft up to expand its 9% share at Google’s expense, said Daniel Ives, an analyst at Wedbush Securities.
«Microsoft is looking to win this AI battle,» it said in a research note Monday.
At the event, Mehdi demonstrated how the AI-enhanced search engine will make buying and creating emails much easier. One demo showed how Bing could estimate, for example, whether a certain type of sofa would fit in the back of a car by gathering web data about the vehicle’s dimensions.
For the quarter ended December 31, Alphabet reported $42.6 billion in Google search and other revenue, while Microsoft reported $3.2 billion in search and news advertising.
Behind Microsoft’s OpenAI partnership is its plan to invest in supercomputer development and cloud support so the startup can release more sophisticated technology and aim for the level of artificial intelligence dreamed of in science fiction.
The fruit of this work, however, is more immediate. Last week, Microsoft announced that the startup’s AI will generate meeting notes in Teams, its collaboration software, and suggest email responses to vendors using its Viva Sales subscription.