Microsoft thinks it finally has a weapon to challenge Alphabet's leadership in internet search.
The software giant, like other tech groups, has tried unsuccessfully to compete with the Google search engine. The latter has even become more important again, relegating its so-called rivals to stooges.
The dominance of the Mountain View, Calif.-based group eventually sickened to the point where some rivals simply gave up. Bing, Microsoft's search engine, was the world's second most popular in 2022, with a measly 3.04% of the market share, according to Statcounter. That's far behind Alphabet's Google, with about 92.6% of the market share.
Yahoo came in third with 1.24% of search engine market share followed by the Russian search engine Yandex with 1%.
Invest $10 Billion
But Microsoft (MSFT) is convinced that the throne of Google has never been so fragile. This conviction is based on the emergence of ChatGPT, a conversational robot with which humans will be able to converse in a natural language. It has become the buzz tool in the tech circles since it was launched on November 30. It was created by Open AI.
The Redmond, Washington-based company plans to invest another $10 billion in OpenAI, the company that created ChatGPT, reports Bloomberg News. The two parties are in discussion. The terms on the table call for Microsoft to invest that money over several years. If agreed, the investment could value OpenAI at around $29 billion. However, the discussions began several years ago and the two parties had planned to conclude them at the end of 2022.
"We do not comment on speculation," a Microsoft spokesperson said in an emailed statement.
OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In 2019, Microsoft invested $1 billion in OpenAI, which was created in 2015 by tech luminaries such as Elon Musk.
In less than a month, the chatbot ChatGPT has been a dazzling success. From academics to techies to the general public, the artificial intelligence (AI) of the ChatGPT tool blows minds. Social networks and press articles in different languages are full of examples of the more than impressive results of those who have tested ChatGPT.
ChatGPT is an acronym which stands for "generative pre-trained transformer." It is a conversational robot with which humans will be able to converse in a natural language.
What is innovative is the fact that this artificial intelligence interface is perfectly at ease in a conversational mode: you can ask it a lot of questions one after the other, and expect clear answers.
ChatGPT Is the Buzzword
ChatGPT has answers to almost everything.
You can ask ChatGPT to write a film script, the plan of a thesis, or computer code. In short, it is a completely "generalist” robot. The most impressive thing, according to AI experts, is the fact that ChatGPT provides its answers both quickly and without any access to the internet.
Its knowledge is contained in its large virtual network of computer neurons.
The engineers and developers behind ChatGPT started by providing it with large amounts of texts, before asking it various questions and systematically noting down all its answers. They then classified them to improve them on the basis of both quality, precision, usefulness, and, finally, with a view to reduce the toxicity of the answers.
The ChatGPT application is based on another model, one built in 2020 and called GPT-3. This previous model has swallowed up so much text and has so many parameters, so many nodes in its computer neural network, that it is able to generate text extremely fluidly.
Two skills of ChatGPT are considered resolutely innovative: the robot's ability to break down a relatively complex task into several small elementary tasks, as a computer program would do, in order to facilitate its execution for the benefit of humans.
The success of ChatGPT has led many schools to ban the tool. This is the case in New York where students are prohibited from having access to it, since it can generate essays and papers easily.
But for Microsoft ChatGPT is a huge boon. The company is preparing to launch a version of its search engine Bing that uses the artificial intelligence behind the tool to answer some search queries rather than just showing a list of links, according to media reports.
Microsoft hopes the new feature, which could launch before the end of March, will help it outflank Google.
ChatGPT has attracted more than a million users since launching in November.
