It’s been a tough few months for the tech industry. There have been tens of thousands of layoffs, hundreds of billions in lost value on Wall Street, and a high-profile scandal at a cryptocurrency firm that has shaken faith in that young market.
But in a conference center on Microsoft’s sprawling campus, Tuesday was a moment of hubris. Microsoft executives and engineers and a small research lab partner called OpenAI unveiled a new Internet search engine and web browser that uses the next iteration of artificial intelligence technology that many in the industry believe could be key. for your future.
This new artificial intelligence became a fascination for millions of people two months ago when OpenAI launched a chatbot called ChatGPT. Able to answer questions, write poetry and comment on almost any topic thrown at him, ChatGPT provided the tech industry with a jolt of enthusiasm amid its biggest job contraction in at least 15 years.
The excitement around the OpenAI technology, as well as the work of several competitors expected to hit the market soon, reminds tech veterans of other moments that have turned Silicon Valley upside down, from the first iPhone and the Google search engine to the Netscape web browser. It laid the foundation for internet marketing.
Microsoft caught up with browsers and largely missed the move to mobile computing that came with the iPhone; its Bing search engine is a distant second in popularity after Google. But it could be the first big company in tech’s next big thing if chatbots and their technology, called generative AI, live up to their billing.
“This technology will reshape virtually every software category we know of,” said Satya Nadella, Microsoft CEO. He added that “a race begins today in terms of what you can expect.”
On Tuesday, in a room packed with nearly 100 reporters, editors and photographers, Microsoft showed off a new Bing search engine. Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president at Microsoft, used a new conversational interface to search for a 65-inch TV suitable for gaming. Since the service listed TVs, he asked her to narrow the list down to the cheapest models. He quickly did.
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He then used the chatbot to plan a vacation in Mexico and research Japanese poets. With a short query, she could ask the system to translate the results from Spanish to English or display a particular haiku poem.
“You see, this is much better than today’s search,” Mr. Mehdi said.
Mr. Mehdi also introduced a new version of the company’s Edge web browser that offers its own chatbot service. After uploading a press release, he asked the bot to summarize the document. He also asked her to generate a tweet about the new Bing search engine and asked her to generate a snippet of computer code for a new software program.
Microsoft rolled out its new version of Bing to a limited number of people on Tuesday. Each user will be able to run a limited number of queries and people will be able to join a waiting list to access the full version of the service. The company plans to expand to millions more people by the end of the month.
Other companies are jumping into the chatbot race. On Monday, Google announced that it would soon offer a chatbot called Bard and would start adding chatbot technology into its own search engine. Meta, the parent company of Facebook, is accelerating its efforts to launch similar technology in various products. And countless startups are building their own generative AI products, named for technologies that generate words, images, and other media on their own.
Executives, entrepreneurs, and investors are hoping that chatbots don’t become what the tech industry seems to be producing for some time: a curiosity that falls short of high expectations.
There have been many — driverless cars that can’t quite get the self-driving part right. Portable technologies that still need a smartphone nearby to be really useful. And the cryptocurrencies that promised to change the world of finance, but have so far been largely an asset to speculators.
Microsoft has worked closely with OpenAI, investing $13 billion in the startup and supplying the billions of dollars in computing power needed to build its AI technology. Microsoft declined to discuss the specific technology behind its new search engine, but it’s likely based on a widely rumored OpenAI brainchild called GPT-4, the successor to what the San Francisco company released two months ago.
“Satya played her hand beautifully,” said Andrew Ng, a researcher and entrepreneur who previously oversaw artificial intelligence labs at both Google and Chinese giant Baidu.
Like similar services from startups like Perplexity and You.com, Microsoft’s new search engine annotates what the chatbot says, so people can easily check their sources. And it fits in with Microsoft’s index of all websites, so you can instantly access the latest information posted on the Internet. The company also said its search engine includes technology designed to identify and remove problematic content from the chat service.
Last week, Microsoft launched its first AI integration into Outlook, its email service, with a tool that helps sellers write personalized emails In the coming months, Microsoft plans to release features with generative AI on average every week, said Charles Lamanna, an executive who oversees the apps Microsoft builds for businesses.
He compared this new wave of AI technologies to the rise of the Internet or personal computing. “Everyone is in a room with the lights off trying to get a feel for what this market and opportunity is really like,” she said in an interview last week.
But it’s unclear how much appetite companies will have for these services because technologies like ChatGPT are much more expensive to run than traditional software.
“The economics of software will probably have to change,” Lamanna said. “The software may be a bit more expensive, but it will do some pretty amazing things.”
New chatbots come with baggage. They often do not distinguish between fact and fiction. They can generate biased language against women and people of color. And experts worry that people will use them to spread lies at a speed they couldn’t in the past.
“Businesses often release these technologies too quickly, ignoring their flaws and then trying to fix them as they go along,” said Chirag Shah, a University of Washington professor who explores chatbot flaws. “This can cause real damage.”
Google and Meta had been reluctant to widely implement generative AI because its flaws could damage their reputations. But OpenAI, a startup with no real brand to protect, was willing to go further.
in a 2000 Word Blog Post Posted ahead of the press event, Brad Smith, Microsoft’s president, called this a “breakthrough year” and acknowledged the potential downsides, calling for “broad and deep conversations” on the issues.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, argued that it was time to release generative AI to a mass audience. “We are eager to continue learning from real-world use,” he said. “You have to do that in the real world, not in the lab.”
