Microsoft doesn’t want its rivals to use Bing’s search index to power its AI chatbots. according to a report from Bloomberg. The company has reportedly told two unnamed Bing-powered search engines that it will restrict their access to Microsoft search data if they continue to use it with its AI tools.
as pointed out Bloomberg, Microsoft licenses Bing search data to various search engines, including DuckDuckGo, Yahoo, and the artificial intelligence search engine You.com. While DuckDuckGo, for example, uses a combination from Bing and its own web crawler to provide search results, you.com and snow they also pull some of your results from Bing, which helps conserve some of the time and resources it takes to crawl the entire web.
However, Microsoft apparently draws the line by using the Bing search index as fodder for AI chatbots. Sources close to the situation tell Bloomberg that Microsoft believes that using Bing data in this way is a violation of its contract, and that it may choose to terminate its agreements with search engines accused of misusing this information.
“We have been in contact with non-compliant partners as we continue to consistently enforce our terms across the board,” Microsoft says. Bloomberg. “We will continue to work with them directly and provide any information necessary to find a way forward.” It’s unclear if Microsoft took action against any search engines and the company did not immediately respond to the edgerequest for comments.
With more companies like Google coming forward with their opinions on the OpenAI ChatGPT chatbot, it is likely that Microsoft will want to make its own search data unique to the Bing chatbot. The tool is already powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 technology, the latest and most powerful version of the company’s language model, and is capable of answering various questions, creating summaries, generating code, writing social media posts, and more.
