Microsoft and OpenAI are taking their partnership forward by making Bing the default search engine for ChatGPT. In a conference on Tuesday, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said, “this is just the start of what we plan to do with our partners in OpenAI to bring the best of Bing to the ChatGPT experience.”
Microsoft has invested billions of dollars into OpenAI and is already using its technology in its Bing search, email, Word documents, Excel, and data analysis. OpenAI’s systems run on Microsoft’s Azure-based cloud computing. The two companies rely on each other and are taking on Google, which has its own generative AI, Bard.
Bing search is rolling out to ChatGPT Plus subscribers, and it can be enabled with a plugin. The feature is also coming to the free version of ChatGPT soon. “ChatGPT will now have a world-class search engine built-in to provide timelier and more up-to-date answers with access from the web,” Yusuf Mehdi, head of consumer marketing at Microsoft, shared in a blog post. “Now, ChatGPT answers can be grounded by search and web data and include citations so you can learn more — all directly from within chat.”
Google remains the number one search engine in the world, but Bing’s integration into ChatGPT means more people will be using Microsoft’s search engine indirectly. ChatGPT has gained huge popularity since its launch, but it is still limited in its ability to answer to the latest events. With Bing as the default search engine on ChatGPT, the AI chatbot will be able to provide better results for current events.
With the partnership between the two companies, Microsoft is letting developers make plugins that work in its Copilot chatbot, Bing, and ChatGPT.