Microsoft may be adding OpenAI’s ChatGPT features to Bing Search in the coming months. According to a report by The Information, two sources from the company is saying the company likely will be adding the popular ChatGPT AI question and answer service to Bing, Microsoft’s search engine.
What is ChatGPT. OpenAI-launched chatbot ChatGPT several months ago and it has become incredibly popular across the web. Everyone, not just SEOs, are using it to get answers for homework, for writing essays and to get answers to their queries. Some have called ChatGPT the Google killer, but that may be a stretch.
ChatGPT is a chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022. It is built on top of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 family of large language models, and is fine-tuned with both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques. ChatGPT uses content across the web from before 2021 to teach itself how to answer questions, but when it comes to recent and trending topics, it has difficulty. You can learn more about how it technically works in this blog post.
The report. The report from The Information writes, “Microsoft could soon get a return on its $1 billion investment in OpenAI, creator of the ChatGPT chatbot, which gives humanlike text answers to questions. Microsoft is preparing to launch a version of its Bing search engine that uses the artificial intelligence behind ChatGPT to answer some search queries rather than just showing a list of links, according to two people with direct knowledge of the plans. Microsoft hopes the new feature, which could launch before the end of March, will help it outflank Google, its much bigger search rival.”
There has been a lot of coverage of this report that you can find on Techmeme.
Google in trouble. Honestly, I don’t think Google is in trouble despite reports of “code red” at Google over the AI based Chatbot. Google has pretty advanced AI and machine learning that can likely do exactly what ChatGPT does already or better. In fact, Google’s spam team said they have methods to detect and neutralize AI plagarized scraped types of content. Plus, we know there are plenty of tools to detect AI generated content, so if AI can detect AI, I wonder how much of a code red it is?
Why we care. With any new search feature, espesially a chatbot, this can change and redirect searcher behavior. As SEOs, SEMs and marketers, understanding searcher behavior and showing up in the places that people are searching is important to drive awareness, traffic and business for you and your clients.
This is very new, but I am sure we all will be watching this space very carefully to make sure we leverage it for clients and stakeholders.
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About the author
Barry Schwartz a Contributing Editor to Search Engine Land and a member of the programming team for SMX events. He owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry can be followed on Twitter here.
