Microsoft has one big goal when immersing artificial intelligence (artificial intelligence / AI) into Bing, their search engine.
That goal is to disrupt Google's dominance in the search engine business, where Google's profits from Google's main business are very high.
"From now on, (profits) will continue to decline," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, as quoted by us from the Financial Times, Thursday (9/2/2023).
Nadella's belief was expressed when he introduced the latest version of Bing, which is now equipped with AI such as the ChatGPT service released by OpenAI. Even Nadella is also willing that the search engine business will experience a decrease in income to disrupt Google's main business. Even though Microsoft's income from Bing is also not very small, because it reached USD 11 billion in 2022.
"There is a difference in the search engine business, which for us is not too big. But for Google it is big, they have to be very defensive," said Nadella.
What Nadella meant by this is the possibility of a decrease in search engine users because questions from users have been answered by AI. This should reduce search engine user traffic.
But Nadella also realized that Google would also release a search engine powered by AI, and users would later choose which search engine they would use.
Since creating Bing, Microsoft has spent billions of dollars to challenge Google's dominance. But so far their efforts have not produced a significant impact, because according to Statcounter, the market share of Bing users is currently only 3%, compared to Google Search, which has a market share of 93%.
Previously reported, Microsoft has released a new Bing that uses the same AI as ChatGPT, which will also be embedded in the Edge browser.
In the demonstration that was showcased at the event, Microsoft showcased the new version of Bing in several configurations. One of them displays traditional search results with a summary from AI next to them, while the other mode allows users to talk directly to the Bing chatbot and ask questions like the ChatGPT interface.
Microsoft showed several search examples, including asking Bing for recipes, vacation tips, and shopping for furniture on Ikea. In one after another, Bing was asked to make travel plans for a five-day vacation in Mexico City, and that question was fully answered by a chatbot complete with rough details as well as links to resources.
Unlike ChatGPT, whose knowledge is limited until 2021, the new version of Bing can display news and information about the latest events. Microsoft says the feature is powered by the latest version of GPT 3.5, OpenAI's large language model (LMM) that powers ChatGPT.
Microsoft calls this model the 'Prometheus', and says it's more powerful than GPT 3.5 and can answer questions with up-to-date information.