Image: JASON REDMOND (AFP)
With the help of the technology behind the text machine ChatGPT, users should be able to have conversations with Microsoft’s search engine Bing. However, Google is also developing in this direction – the course has been set for the competition between the tech giants in artificial intelligence.
Users of Microsoft’s search engine Bing should be able to enter queries of up to 1,000 characters in text form and get answers in full sentences in a chat. This also applies to more complex tasks: one of the examples at Microsoft’s presentation on Tuesday was asking Bing to plan a multi-day trip. You can then ask the search engine how much the trip would cost and whether you can adjust the route. In return, Google is preparing similarly functioning chat software for use in its search engine.
The ChatGPT software from the developer company OpenAI, which was released in November last year, can formulate texts in a matter of seconds that could also have been written by a human being. The program was trained with enormous amounts of texts and thus provides flawless grammar answers, but at least in the current version the content is not always reliable. During an early test of conversations with Bing by a Washington Post reporter, the search engine threw up a conspiracy theory about actor Tom Hanks and the Watergate scandal.
Bing uses a further development of the publicly available ChatGPT program. While the knowledge base of the currently usable ChatGPT is stuck at the status of 2021, the chat software from Bing should also know about recent events or timetables.
Microsoft invested several billion dollars in OpenAI and also integrates the company’s software into its office programs – like a kind of “co-pilot” for the applications. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said he believes the technology will transform just about every category of software. OpenAI boss Sam Altman spoke of the “beginning of a new era”.
What can I replace eggs with?
In Microsoft’s example, the search engine was also asked about substitutes for eggs in a recipe or nearby events and answered in full sentences. You can also ask, for example, whether an Ikea couch fits into a certain car model for transport. An important difference to ChatGP should also be that the Bing version will be able to display links to sources. This should enable users to form their own opinion of the reliability of the answers.
By choosing the right links on a given topic, Google became the dominant search engine with a market share of around 90 percent. For several years, Google has also offered specific answers to certain questions. On Monday, Google presented the plan to gradually make its software that can talk to people, which has been developed for years, available to a broader public, including in web searches. The US Internet group has so far hesitated to publish its language software.
Both Google and Microsoft are initially only making their chat search available to a small group of users. At Microsoft, the function is initially only available to users of the Edge web browser.
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