SEATTLE – ChatGPT, the new chatbot that’s taken the internet by storm and already drafted unknown numbers of proposals, emails, poems, and grade school reports–and of course answered questions for more than a million users–will be integrated into Microsoft’s Bing search engine sometime in March, according to multiple media reports.
Microsoft has not commented publicly on the subject, but a partnership between the two companies would make sense. Microsoft has already invested $1 billion in OpenAI, the startup behind ChatGPT, and is using OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 image-generating A.I. to create images from text within Bing. It has also licensed OpenAI’s text-generating software.
Assuming reports of this partnership are true, this is very, very bad news for Google. Even before word of the Bing integration leaked out, Google upper management, presumably led by CEO Sundar Pichai, had reportedly called a “code red” over ChatGPT’s astonishingly fast growth in popularity since its release about six weeks ago. “Code red” reportedly signals an existential threat, and chatbots such as ChatGPT definitely constitute such a threat to Google.
As I discovered when I tried it myself, ChatGPT can be a faster and easier way to learn about something than a Google search. And Google search can’t do handy things like draft your marketing copy.
Needless to say, Google engineers are also pretty good at creating A.I., and the company has developed its own chatbot, named LaMDA, that supposedly rivals ChatGPT. LaMDA became briefly famous last summer when a Google engineer publicly claimed it was sentient. Google says it isn’t, and the rest of us can’t check for ourselves because, unlike ChatGPT, LaMDA has never been widely released. Google likely won’t release it to the public anytime soon.
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