It’s been a tough few months for the tech industry. There were Tens of thousands of layoffshundreds of billions in Depreciation on Wall Street and a high profile scandal at a crypto company that has shaken confidence in this fledgling market.
But at a conference center on Microsoft’s sprawling campus, Tuesday was a moment of swagger. Executives and engineers from Microsoft 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, which many in the industry believe could hold a key to their future .
This new artificial intelligence became a fascination for millions of people two months ago with the release of OpenAI a chatbot called ChatGPT. Capable of answering questions, writing poetry, and rattling on almost any topic that gets in its way, ChatGPT has brought a surge of excitement to the tech industry in the midst of the biggest jobs contraction in at least 15 years.
The enthusiasm for OpenAI’s technology — as well as the work of several competitors likely to be launched soon — reminds tech veterans of other moments that turned Silicon Valley upside down, from the first iPhone and the Google search engine to to the Netscape web browser, which paved the way for the commercialization of the Internet.
Microsoft has caught up with browsers and missed the move to mobile computing that came with the iPhone; The search engine Bing lags far behind Google in terms of popularity. But it could be the first major company to develop the next big thing in tech if chatbots and their technology, called generative AI, live up to their bill.
“This technology will transform pretty much every category of software that we know,” said Satya Nadella, Microsoft chief executive. He added that “a race begins today in terms of what to expect.”
On Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled a new Bing search engine in a room crowded with nearly a hundred reporters, editors, and photographers. Microsoft corporate vice president Yusuf Mehdi used a new conversational interface to search for a 65-inch TV suitable for video games. When the service listed TVs, it asked them to narrow the list down to the cheapest models. It was quick.
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He then used the chatbot to plan a Mexican vacation and research Japanese poets. With a quick query, he could ask the system to translate results from Spanish to English or display a specific haiku poem.
“See, this is so much better than today’s search,” Mr Mehdi said.
Mr. Mehdi also unveiled a new version of the company’s Edge web browser that offers its own chatbot service. After loading a press release, he asked the bot to summarize the document. He also asked it to tweet about the new Bing search engine and had it generate a snippet of computer code for a new software program.
Microsoft released its new version of Bing to a limited number of people on Tuesday. Each user can run a limited number of queries, and people can join a waiting list for access to the full version of the service. The company plans to expand to millions more people by the end of the month.
Other companies are getting into the chatbot race. Google announced this on Monday soon to offer a chatbot called Bard and begin incorporating chatbot technology into its own search engine. Meta, Facebook’s parent company, is rushing to release similar technologies in various products. And there are countless start-ups to develop their own generative AI productsthe name for technologies that generate words, images and other media themselves.
Executives, entrepreneurs, and investors are hoping chatbots won’t turn out to be what the tech industry has seemed to be producing for some time: an oddity that falls short of great expectations.
There have been many: self-driving cars that can’t quite get the self-driving part right. Wearable technologies that still need a smartphone nearby to be really useful. And cryptocurrencies that promised to change the financial world, but so far have mainly been a win for speculators.
Microsoft worked closely together with OpenAI, 13 billion dollars invested in commissioning and supplied the billions of dollars of computing power needed to build its AI technology. Microsoft declined to discuss the specific technology underlying its new search engine, but it is likely based on a widely used OpenAI creation called GPT-4, the successor to what the San Francisco-based company released two months ago.
“Satya played his hand beautifully,” said Andrew Ng, a researcher and entrepreneur who previously led the AI labs at Google and Chinese giant Baidu.
Like similar services from startups like Perplexity and You.com, Microsoft’s new search engine comments on what the chatbot is saying so people can easily check its sources. And it’s integrated with Microsoft’s index of all websites, so it can instantly access the latest information published on the web. The company also said its search engine includes technology designed to identify and remove problematic content from the chat service.
Last week Microsoft released its first AI integration into Outlook, its email service, with a Tool that helps sellers write custom emails. In the coming months, Microsoft plans to release generative AI features every week on average, said Charles Lamanna, an executive who oversees the applications Microsoft builds for businesses.
He compared this new wave of AI technologies to the rise of the internet or personal computing. “Everybody’s in a room with the lights off trying to feel what the heck this market and opportunity actually looks like,” he said in an interview last week.
It’s unclear how much appetite businesses will have for these services, however, as technologies like ChatGPT are far more expensive to operate than traditional software.
“The economics of software will likely need to change,” said Mr. Lamanna. “Software might be a bit more expensive, but it’s going to do some pretty amazing things.”
The new chatbots come with baggage. They often fail to distinguish between fact and fiction. You can create language that is biased towards women and people of color. And experts fear people will use them to spread lies at a rate it hasn’t been able to in the past.
“Companies often bring these technologies to market too quickly, ignore their flaws, and then try to fix them on the fly,” said Chirag Shah, a University of Washington professor who studies bugs in chatbots. “That can do real damage.”
Google and Meta had been reluctant to use generative AI on a large scale because its shortcomings could tarnish its reputation. But OpenAI – a new company with no real brand to protect – was willing to push the envelope.
in one 2,000 word blog post Released ahead of the press event, Microsoft President Brad Smith called this year a “watershed year” and acknowledged the potential downsides, calling for “wide and deep conversations” about the issues.
Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, argued that it was time to bring generative AI to a mass audience. “We are committed to continuing to learn from practice,” he said. “You have to do that in the real world, not in the lab.”
