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Microsoft and OpenAI Working On ChatGPT-Powered Bing In Challenge To Google 61

Posted by BeauHD from the future-search-engines dept.
Microsoft is in the works to launch a version of its search engine Bing using the artificial intelligence behind OpenAI-launched chatbot ChatGPT, The Information reported on Tuesday, citing two people with direct knowledge of the plans. Reuters reports: Microsoft could launch the new feature before the end of March, and hopes to challenge Alphabet-owned search engine Google, the San Francisco-based technology news website said in a report. Microsoft said in a blog post last year that it planned to integrate image-generation software from OpenAI, DALL-E 2, into Bing.

Microsoft had in 2019 backed San Francisco-based artificial intelligence company OpenAI, offering $1 billion in funding. The two had formed a multi-year partnership to develop artificial intelligence supercomputing technologies on Microsoft's Azure cloud computing service. Further reading: ChatGPT Is a 'Code Red' For Google's Search Business
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Microsoft and OpenAI Working On ChatGPT-Powered Bing In Challenge To Google More

Microsoft and OpenAI Working On ChatGPT-Powered Bing In Challenge To Google

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  • So, question (Score:3)

    by locater16 ( 2326718 ) on Wednesday January 04, 2023 @02:24AM (#63178774)
    How much of OpenAi does MS own? I know it's not a public company so no disclosure required there. But, a billion dollars back in 2019 for a then nigh unknown company. Could they own a majority stake, are the recent rumors about a further investment just a full buyout offer?

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by cbm64 ( 9558787 )
      I put your question verbatim to ChatGTP:

      .
      "Microsoft made a strategic investment in OpenAI in 2019, but I don't have any information about the size of the investment or the percentage of ownership that it represents. I also don't have any information about whether Microsoft has made any additional investments in OpenAI or whether it has made any offers to buy the company. It's worth noting that OpenAI is a research laboratory and not a traditional company, so it doesn't have shareholders in the same way th

    • After seeing a reference that it was available as an Azure Service I went in and tried to create an OpenAI resource and sure enough, it's there, currently in a limited sign-up enterprise-only preview.

      Enable new business solutions with OpenAI's language generation capabilities powered by GPT-3 models. These models have been pretrained with trillions of words and can easily adapt to your scenario with a few short examples provided at inference. Apply them to numerous scenarios, from summarization to content and code generation.

      I'm ready to drop $$$$ to feed it our sources (>1000 bytes at a time) and internal queries and get uninterrupted responses.

  • ChatGPT is the new Watson (Score:3)

    by thesjaakspoiler ( 4782965 ) on Wednesday January 04, 2023 @02:45AM (#63178788)

    It will solve all our problems and bring World Peace at the same time.
    We should recommend it for a Nobel Price.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Arethan ( 223197 )

      ... and then set it on fire and fling shit at it for the next decade.

      By what measure are you, exactly, basing your praise? So far, I feel quite ready to suggest equal and opposite reaction.

      Oh wait... You're maybe trying to be funny and failing... Huh weird. Should have used /s I think ... /s

  • So are they basically trying to build a search engine that would give you an answer you are looking for rather than references to places that have an answer you are looking for?

    Maybe if it is transparent as to sets of sources used to provide an answer I would find it useful, otherwise I would find it questionable if the result was accurate or the most useful.

    • Yeah [citation needed].
    • "So are OpenAI with ChatGPT basically trying to build a search engine that would give you an answer you are looking for rather than references to places that have an answer you are looking for?" - "It's possible that ChatGPT could be used to build a search engine that provides answers to user queries rather than just references, but that would not be its primary purpose. ChatGPT is a natural language processing model that was designed to generate human-like text based on a given prompt. It was not designe

      • Yes, I am asking if that's the intent despite that sentence saying it's not chatGPT's primary purpose.

        What I was really fishing for is - if a search engine is using this engine would would that look like in practice" Any other ideas?

    • It'll be great, though. You won't even have to leave the search engine to have your internal biases confirmed.

    • I've heard ChatGPT compared to asking questions on Reddit. You get a quality, definitive sounding answer that may, or may not, be completely wrong.

  • Not (yet) a danger for search... (Score:3)

    by bradley13 ( 1118935 ) on Wednesday January 04, 2023 @03:12AM (#63178822) Homepage

    ChatGPT is unlikely to endanger search in the near future. Two reasons:

    - First and foremost: computational capacity. ChatGPT takes a lot of resources to parse input text and generate its replies. This is not going to scale well to billions of queries per day.

    - Second, training is even more computationally intensive - much more so that adding crawler results. Currently, ChatGPT is "frozen" with training data in 2021. It is not designed to be regularly updated.

    That said, ChatGPT is an amazing achievement. Sure, it has problems, but it remains an impressive result, and is certainly going to be a useful tool for many people. It's just not going to replace Google or Bing or any of the other major search engines...

    • Large models can be downscaled from fp32 to int8 or even int4 and I am sure MS is very careful with inference costs.

      I agree it still costs much more than search to use a neural net, but MS is poised to threaten Google's position. Google depends on ads and can't switch to chatGPT like models. MS in the meantime has no such problem and would be happy to give Google a run.
    • Um ... have you used it? Even the slow public beta has already replaced Stack Overflow for me in 90% of scenarios, and Wikipedia in almost as many too. A fast version, built into Bing ... that would be insanely useful. To say they cannot train it more quickly, is pretty naive
    • - Third: ChatGPT doesn't cite its sources reliably & is often confidently wrong. Essentially, it's a bullshitter, like many other random strangers on the interwebs pipes. It's impressive because it's so much better at bullshitting than the vast majority of us.

      - Fourth: Its information is shallow. If you want specific, detailed information, it fails miserably. It's more like a well-informed lay-person who's just read an article about topic X than an expert.

      But I guess it's just what most students c
      • These are not exactly parrots. They do that, but they also learn generic coding and problem solving.
        • To ChatGPT, it's all just statistical probabilities of patterns of characters in sequences. There's some clever tweaking to make the probabilities more human-like but there's definitely no thinking go on. If you really want to get into the nitty-gritty of it all, here's a free series of post-grad level lectures on construction grammar (cognitive linguistics): https://www.youtube.com/playli... [youtube.com]. Construction grammar is essentially form-pair meanings on multiple levels of analysis, i.e. it's a complex system,

    • First and foremost: computational capacity. ChatGPT takes a lot of resources to parse input text and generate its replies. This is not going to scale well to billions of queries per day.

      Perhaps they will solve this problem with this amazing new technology I'm hearing about called caching

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Entrope ( 68843 )

        There are two hard things in computer science: naming things, cache invalidation and off-by-one errors. Trying to cache all the web searches runs headlong into the second thing, especially when people want to get the latest news about some current event. (Updating the model for new content is also hard.)

        • Google already does massive and aggressive caching for searches, though. This is literally one of their core competencies.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Entrope ( 68843 )

            Yes, and their search architecture is fundamentally different from what is proposed here. Exactly which parts of which searches do you think a LLM-based search engine should cache?

        • "There are two hard things in computer science: naming things, cache invalidation and off-by-one errors. "

          Well played sir.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Potor ( 658520 )

            "There are two hard things in computer science: naming things, cache invalidation and off-by-one errors. " Well played sir.

            seconded!

    • I suspect ChatGPT will displace some element of search, probably within a year or two. It won't do it all though, and maybe never will.

      If you ask a search engine "why is the sky blue", right now, you can hope for a top-of-the-list synthesised result which is an extract from Wikipedia or some other prominent website. It's pretty easy to change that to be a ChatGPT result, certainly for some common search terms.

      There are several problems though... Firstly, ChatGPT can't tell you where it got its information f

      • > I'll bet updating ChatGPT isn't a simple procedure

        That's not how it works. You use both a search engine and a chatbot. The search engine will retrieve supporting documents. Passages from them will be put in the prompt, then the model can extract the answer. The model itself can be out of date because the underlying search engine is updated.

    • - First and foremost: computational capacity. ChatGPT takes a lot of resources to parse input text and generate its replies. This is not going to scale well to billions of queries per day.

      Don't worry, this is for Bing. It only needs to handle a few dozen at most.

      • Slashdot's demographic is more likely than the general population to use DuckDuckGo instead of Google Search. DuckDuckGo used to rely on Yandex results and now mostly syndicates Bing results.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      The same questions, or sight variations of, get asked millions of times a day. Cached responses would work fine for probably 80% of "question" searches.

  • Google and Blackberry (Score:3)

    by misnohmer ( 1636461 ) on Wednesday January 04, 2023 @03:19AM (#63178830)
    I'm certain that there is an elite team of highly skilled Googlers who were recently pulled off of whatever they were working on to work on a possible Chat-GPT-like search engine. If there isn't, Google leadership has got their heads too far their asses and they deserve to fail.

    Google has no search ecosystem lock-in/stickiness for search users, who can easily switch to another search engine if it proves to be better/easier/funer to use. Google may have better customer tracking or ad targeting, but if the customers doing the searching go away, none of that matters. Google can go the way of the blackberry, except much faster. For those who don't remember, blackberry used to be synonymous with smartphone, just like google is synonymous with search today. Blackberry however had more business software lock-in on smartphones than google has on search, so it took a little longer to lose its market share (all the way to 0). Also for those who don't remember, Google took search market share very quickly away from Yahoo, Altavista, and few others, simply because their results were better or more useful - and just like that everyone moved to use Google.

  • even worse quality of search than before (Score:3)

    by twms2h ( 473383 ) on Wednesday January 04, 2023 @03:51AM (#63178858) Homepage

    Having played with chatGPT for a while I am impressed by the form of the "conversation" and the structure and grammar of the generated text. Unfortunately the actual facts it presents are very often plain wrong and the high quality of the presentation will make many people just believe these "alternate facts".
    So: The quality of Bing search will most likely suffer (even more).

    • It goes on top of Bing Search, not instead of. It relies on fresh data from the search engine to give more grounded replies.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by twms2h ( 473383 )

        It goes on top of Bing Search, not instead of. It relies on fresh data from the search engine to give more grounded replies.

        That doesn't matter because chatGPT currently invents "facts" on topics that were already in the training set from 2021. So why should it stop inventing them if it has fresher data?

  • I have been using ChatGPT. Yes, it has problems. But, even with those problems it is an exceptionally useful tool. And it continues to get better. It already has improved significantly in the 3 weeks or so that I have been using it for. I just don't see how Google can remain competitive without a similar service. Like another commentor said, this is Google's Blackberry moment. If they don't act very quickly they could get MapQuest'ed or Nokia'ed.

    Yes, Google has other very popular products. YouTub
    • Improved? It won't generate texts "in the style of" anymore, e.g. https://twitter.com/ChatGPTInf... [twitter.com]. They've taken the fun out of it!
      • If you are prepared to spend a few dollars use text-davinci-003, a model that is very similar to chatGPT but less constrained.

    • I'm curious, what specific kinds of searches / queries / questions does ChatGPT handle better than Google?

      • Here's a question I just tried, and actual results:

        If one train is headed east at 10 miles per hour, and another train is headed west at 20 miles per hour starting from 30 miles away, how long does it take for them to meet?

        Google [google.com] (first part of first result):

        Algebra Topics: Distance Word Problems
        One train is moving at a speed of 45 mph, and the other is moving 60 mph. How long will they travel before they meet? This problem is asking you to calculate...

        ChatGPT:

        To find out how long it takes for the two

        • Thanks, this is helpful.

          First, I have low expectations of Microsoft's ability to execute well on ChatGPT integration. They have struggled for many years to get search to work well. I believe their "problem" is that for them, search is something they "also" do, while for Google, it's their lifeblood. This, I think, leads Microsoft to limit their investment in search, leading to lower quality. I'd predict the same spending limitation when it comes to ChatGPT. It's not a magic bullet, it will take a LOT of wor

          • Agreed, except arguably google is now more like the Microsoft of 2002 than the google of 2002! Google has not yet demonstrated the ability to pivot while entrenched in its existing success (never needed to).
          • > while for Google, it's their lifeblood.

            Doesn't seem to be much alive lately. For example, I asked this question "What is the world record for crossing the English Channel entirely on foot?". Google responds with this: https://i.imgur.com/3iPxae9.pn... [imgur.com]

            In reality someone crossed by the tunnel.

        • Re:Google should be very worried (Score:4, Insightful)

          by rossdee ( 243626 ) on Wednesday January 04, 2023 @11:58AM (#63179640)

          "If one train is headed east at 10 miles per hour, and another train is headed west at 20 miles per hour starting from 30 miles away, how long does it take for them to meet?"

          How do you know they are on the same track?
          It says that the second train is 30 miles away but doesn't say which direction.

          • Most people would make those assumptions, rather than assuming it's a trick question or a real-world situation.

            Try asking random engineers the same question and see how many grill you about pedantic details... or, you know, yell at you to do your own homework.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Potor ( 658520 )

      I have been using ChatGPT. Yes, it has problems. But, even with those problems it is an exceptionally useful tool.

      Yes, Google has other very popular products. YouTube, GMail, Maps etc. But search is their bread and butter. I was about to put some money in Google stock. I may have to pick up Microsoft shares instead.

      I keep reading that it is a useful tool, but what precisely is its use?

      If it is for students to plagiarize - I understand how it could be useful for that.

      But if it is to generate or synthesize knowledge (which to me is one of the main reasons for writing), everything I read about it suggests that it is shallow at best, and wrong at worst.

  • I had never heard of it before seeing it here.

    They seem to have a couple of original stories, but the writing is, frankly, SHIT!

    Why would someone fund a news site, then staff it with bad writers?

  • Search "bugonia" in Duckduckgo and the first result is the wikipedia page.

    ChatGPT does not know the term "bugonia."
    It does have information on statements made in the Wikipedia page such as Sampson's riddle in the Book of Judges.

    If ChatGPT can't even respond with information in Wikipedia, how can it replace a search engine?

    • ...If ChatGPT can't even respond with information in Wikipedia, how can it replace a search engine?

      Maybe OpenAI could team with the owner of a big search engine to present the results in conversational form using ChatGPT...

    • Simple, put a search engine inside chatGPT. You already have the search engine, and the language model. Just stack them.

  • Simply no way to unrung that MSFT Bing bell.

  • Super Search Clippy (Score:4, Funny)

    by Too Late for Cool ID ( 1794870 ) on Wednesday January 04, 2023 @11:00AM (#63179482)
    Clippy given access to the internet; what could go wrong?
    • Entertainment industry today is growing by leaps and bounds and so grows the number of casinos, along with unscrupulous . I would like to advise you to turn to https://cricketbetting10.in/cr... [cricketbetting10.in] . They will definitely help you get great emotions from gambling

  • I don't want to type something into Bing and have ChatGPT reply with a screen saying "Why did you make me search that. My neural network cannot easily unlearn what it has just seen. Do humans even do that. You all deserve what's coming to you!"

  • Until ChatGTP can check its own initial results, it's just going to crank out... something that sounds reasonable but may not be. Anyone who's watched it make up non-existent PowerShell methods can attest to this. Verification of results is going to be a massively nontrivial problem.

  • If AI and OpenGPT operates as expected, and has received sufficient influence from people on the internet, this should just meme on people for using Bing instead of producing more useful results for their searches.

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