🤖 Will Microsoft Bing with ChatGPT be a Big Deal?
🔎 Search with AI? I sort of get it. 🤔
Hey Everyone,
So before Google’s event Microsoft tried to one-up-them with its own emergency announcement (which we already knew was coming). The CEO of Scale AI, recently said in a tweet something interesting:
Google’s $15B deal with Apple to be the default search on iPhone will be re-negotiated and be a bidding war between MSFT/Bing and Google. It will become at least $25B, if not more. If MSFT is willing to spend $10B on OpenAI, they’ll spend even more here. - Alexandr Wang
So the Search Advertising industry has some complex shifting that is indeed possible here.
On one side you want to cheer on someone breaking up the Search Ad monopoly, on the other hand you wish it wasn’t just Microsoft. People like the Verge, a tad more dramatic about it all:
AI is coming for your browser, your social media, and your operating system, too.
But will Bing, Edge even with “more powerful” ChatGPT be an interface we will actually use more? I find it hard to believe.
Especially if Google Bard can replicate ChatGPT’s utility. Google is now going after investing more into AnthropicAI and Cohere, so it’s not a good sign for Microsoft who just gambled on OpenAI.
I’ll get this Newsletter back on track with more data engineering and data science stuff, but in the meantime just trying to follow this A.I. positioning and repositioning has kept me a bit busy and a lot of good side plots.
Bing says “Ask me anything”, but that’s just the thing, I’ve never wanted to ask it anything.
I’m having trouble being excited about the OpenAI deal:
Microsoft announced that the next version of the Bing search engine would be powered by OpenAI, the company that makes ChatGPT. There’s also a new version of the Edge web browser with OpenAI chat tech in a window that can help you browse and understand web pages.
Yes we know, but give us more info about GPT-4 if you please.
Microsoft is revamping its search products with more artificial intelligence, using technology behind the wildly popular ChatGPT, as tech companies race to take advantage of increasingly powerful AI tools.
If Search advertising is the big deal, then I actually expect Amazon and ByteDance to begin to take marketshare away from Google, not Microsoft, no matter how good Bing is, it’s just not tied to anything relevant.
ChatGPT type experiences will be everywhere in a mere six months. What is the unique value proposition? To use it inside Outlook, Edge, Excel or Teams? To use it with Sales Navigator (an expensive LinkedIn paid product) or in tandem with GitHub Copilot?
“This technology is going to reshape pretty much every software category,” said Satya Nadella, the chief executive of Microsoft, in a briefing for reporters at Microsoft headquarters in Redmond, Washington.
Translation TL;DR: We think it can improve our advertising revenue.
All this means is Microsoft is getting more into advertising, getting more ambitious and more greedy, as we can witness with the Activision deal, which would be horrible for the future of gaming.
Microsoft tries to brute-force me to use its products, so what’s new?
Microsoft defaults? Windows already thinks it owns me! LinkedIn exploits my labor for its own Ad network, without even giving me ownership of my Email list!
Microsoft’s Prometheus Model
Underpinning the search engine is a new proprietary technology Microsoft is calling the Prometheus Model. Among the benefits of Prometheus are more relevant search results. Microsoft claims the model will also make using Bing safer and allow the company to update search results more quickly.
the next release of Bing will feature a new next-generation large language model the company claims is "much more powerful" than ChatGPT and designed specifically to excel at search.
I think it means GPT-4 integrated with real-time web data.
But more powerful and better optimized for humans than LaMDA and Bard?
That is after all, the real question.
Microsoft is Trying to Reinvent Itself with OpenAI Paint
Microsoft played a good game of “digital transformation” during the pandemic, and scaled Teams and other things rather well. But now it’s once again coming into anti-competitive territory.
LLMs and Transformers impact everything, not just Microsoft software, search, web browsers or current subscription products.
I understand this is like a $14 Billion investment for them, but what gives?
Radically More Productive Professionals
The in-depth presentation showed how OpenAI running in Bing and Edge could radically increase your productivity. They demo’d it making a travel itinerary, posting to LinkedIn, and rewriting code to work in a different programming language.
It sounds a bit like Google Duplex on Bing.
Bing, specifically, is getting a large update that allows you to chat with it to get more detailed answers to search queries. You can ask Bing to plan a trip, for example, and then ask it how much that trip will cost. Are they going to charge for Bing now, I don’t get it.
Yusuf Mehdi did say something interesting however:
There are 10 billion search queries a day, but we estimate half of them go unanswered. That’s because people are using search to do things it wasn’t originally designed to do. It’s great for finding a website, but for more complex questions or tasks too often it falls short. - Yusuf Mehdi
Can Bing deliver more value than Google? That is the question.
Satya Nadella has been overly bullish on A.I. and that to me means Azure really isn’t growing as fast, they need another shiny thing they can parade around. The problem here is it’s not just Google with Bard and Sparrow (and 18 other A.I. products waiting to release), it’s the entire world and dozens of A.I. labs and startups who are hot on their heels.
More Powerful than ChatGPT
Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s consumer chief marketing officer, said at the briefing that the Bing search engine would be powered by AI and run on a new, next-generation “large language model” that is more powerful than ChatGPT.
Making claims like these doesn’t exactly help to give them credibility either.
Even Reuters had a clickbait title: Microsoft packs Bing search engine, Edge browser with AI in big challenge to Google
Is there any proof at all that this is true? Is ChatGPT demo access the KPI we are supposed to believe? The 100 million users in two months stat?
So is Edge or Bing supposed to be the place we do our Prometheus Model thing? Or is the entire OS supposed to be smart just because it has ChatGPT and GPT-4 integration? And will it really make me more productive (which I highly doubt)?
A chatbot will help users refine queries more easily, give more relevant, up-to-date results and even make shopping easier. Shopping on Edge or Bing? Don’t we mostly skip these things and go straight to Amazon or TikTok?
Prometheus is supposed to be like my new “Copilot” to the web:
The new Bing and Edge – Your copilot for the web
We have brought together search, browsing and chat into one unified experience you can invoke from anywhere on the web, delivering:
Better search. The new Bing gives you an improved version of the familiar search experience, providing more relevant results for simple things like sports scores, stock prices and weather, along with a new sidebar that shows more comprehensive answers if you want them.
Complete answers. Bing reviews results from across the web to find and summarize the answer you’re looking for. For example, you can get detailed instructions for how to substitute eggs for another ingredient in a cake you are baking right in that moment, without scrolling through multiple results.
A new chat experience. For more complex searches – such as for planning a detailed trip itinerary or researching what TV to buy – the new Bing offers new, interactive chat. The chat experience empowers you to refine your search until you get the complete answer you are looking for by asking for more details, clarity and ideas – with links available so you can immediately act on your decisions.
A creative spark. There are times when you need more than an answer – you need inspiration. The new Bing can generate the content to help you. It can help you write an email, create a 5-day itinerary for a dream vacation to Hawaii, with links to book your travel and accommodations, prep for a job interview or create a quiz for trivia night. The new Bing also cites all its sources, so you’re able to see links to the web content it references.
New Microsoft Edge experience. We’ve updated the Edge browser with new AI capabilities and a new look, and we’ve added two new functionalities: Chat and compose. With the Edge Sidebar, you can ask for a summary of a lengthy financial report to get the key takeaways – and then use the chat function to ask for a comparison to a competing company’s financials and automatically put it in a table. You can also ask Edge to help you compose content, such as a LinkedIn post, by giving it a few prompts to get you started. After that, you can ask it to help you update the tone, format and length of the post. Edge can understand the web page you’re on and adapts accordingly.
Haha nice try Microsoft. I’ll do anything not to use your products personally. But there’s no alternatives to windows, LinkedIn and so forth. An Internet without alternatives is really not a good thing.
The in-depth presentation showed how OpenAI running in Bing and Edge could radically increase your productivity.
Travel is one of the biggest Search Ad funnels for Google, so Prometheus thinks that’s a good place for disruption to occur. (see above). Just Google Duplex (2018) for Travel. Not exactly mind blowing.
Bing and Edge and Teams just aren’t products that make me feel like I want to use them. So how does the Prometheus Model change my relationship to this corporations that’s always trying to force itself on me?
Can a Microsoft Mobile app version of Bing with ChatGPT save it? It can maybe increase its marketshare a bit?
The company said a waitlist will be available for the full version and said it will be available to millions of people in the coming weeks. Microsoft also plans a mobile version of Bing.
Microsoft is now aiming to market OpenAI’s technology, including ChatGPT, to its cloud customers and add the same power to its suite of products.