Microsoft is reportedly sending invites to an event that will take place later today in its Redmond, Washington headquarters where the company is expected to reveal further details about an upcoming integration between its flagship search engine Bing and OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT.
The event will be starting at 10 AM Easter Time. The invite states that Microsoft’s Chief Executive Officer, Satya Nadella, will be sharing some news about “a few exciting projects”, The Verge reported.
This gathering is occurring less than a day after Alphabet, the parent company of Google, revealed a new product called Bard that will directly compete with ChatGPT as this new wave of AI-powered solutions is getting bigger by the day.
Bard is not yet available to the public as the company is first letting a handful of professional testers give the solution a try before it is released. Will Microsoft (MSFT) be the first company to officially incorporate an AI tool into a globally used search engine? We’ll have to wait a few hours to find out.
Other prominent companies that have already announced some interesting AI tools include Quora – which launched an iOS-only app called Poe, that provides access to multiple AI languages and models. In addition, Shutterstock recently revealed an AI-powered feature that allows users to create images from a text prompt.
Microsoft’s Bet in OpenAI Could Pay Off Big
The stakes appear to be quite high at this point in the tech industry as both Microsoft and Alphabet are rushing to become dominant forces in what seems to be the next big trend in the space.
OpenAI has reportedly attracted over 100 million monthly active users (MAUs) in just a couple of months according to estimates from Swiss bank UBS that used data from SimilarWeb.
We reported just yesterday that a handful of people had an unexpected encounter with an AI-powered version of Microsoft’s Bing that allowed them to make questions as if they were chatting with a person. The tool allowed for up to 1,000 characters, which encouraged users to provide enough context and details about what they were looking for so the chatbot could come up with the best possible answer.
Rumors about the upcoming launch of an AI-powered version of Bing have been brewing for months. Microsoft deepened its ties with OpenAI recently after investing $10 billion in the company in exchange for 49% of its equity.
The company founded by Bill Gates is the sole provider of cloud services to the software company headed by Sam Altman and co-founded by Elon Musk. Microsoft also has plans to incorporate OpenAI’s technologies into many other products including MS Office. In addition, it recently launched Azure OpenAI – a cloud-based platform that allowed users to tap on these AI solutions from their Azure account.
Meanwhile, OpenAI launched a premium version of its popular chatbot that eliminates wait times and generates faster responses in exchange for $20 per month. The firm is also working on an application programming interface (API) that will allow developers to incorporate the technology into their software easily.
Not Everyone Thinks That These AI-Powered Chatbots are Ready for Public Use
Even though companies are rushing to incorporate AI into their suite of solutions and services, experts have warned that the technology has its flaws and that both users and corporations should be fully aware of them.
One of the most frequently heard negative comments is that the knowledge base used by many AI-powered chatbots is limited as the back-end data only goes as far as 2021. This would leave out several significant events, inventions, and scientific findings that the artificial intelligence ignores and that may be relevant to what the user is asking.
Meanwhile, copyright violations, plagiarism, and the proliferation of inaccurate content across the internet are some of the caveats and negative consequences that the widespread use of AI engines could have on the web.
A recent incident portrays what can happen when AI is left unchecked. In this regard, the tech-focused news portal CNET silently started to post articles that were created by an AI tool.
Even though the magazine’s chief editor said that the articles were appropriately proofread and curated before they were published, they later acknowledged that the majority of them contained inaccurate statements. As a result, CNET is no longer using AI to create articles for its websites.
For now, most people and companies are seeing the pros. However, once the technology goes full-on mainstream, the true impact of these models will become evident.
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