Microsoft to Allegedly Add OpenAI’s ChatGPT to Bing

According to Dina Bass at Bloomberg, Microsoft Corporation is talking about adding the renowned chatbot by OpenAI, ChatGPT, to its search engine. This news comes as a surprise to many due to the several limitations of the newly released tool. If we consider the overwhelmingly positive response ChatGPT has garnered since its release, we see why the addition is being considered.

If you’ve read our experience using ChatGPT, you’ll know how easy it was to get answers that usually took hours of digging. According to an anonymous source at Microsoft, the company is heavily relying on the chatbot’s capacity to provide helpful contextual answers to questions. This would be the solution to users being inundated with links from multiple articles, forums, and other media sources when trying to get answers.

You might ask, what would the implication be for the search industry? Good question!

Advantages of Integrating ChatGPT into Bing

• For executives at Microsoft, this should be a no-brainer. Bing, as well as all the other competitors in the search industry, is underperforming massively compared to Google. Having a virtual assistant with the abilities of ChatGPT would be a game changer. Users can ask a question and get a response; no need to sift through multiple sources first. That would definitely be enough to bring in significant users.
• In addition, users would relish the prospect of getting answers to their questions without navigating myriad ads. Seriously, the ads are getting out of hand.
• Another reason why I advocate for ChatGPT to be added to Bing is to leverage personalization. Our internet experience is based on cookies, which largely depend on what type of website you visit. With the chatbot, you can clearly see previous conversations you had, and every new conversation adds a layer of context.

The Overall Impact of ChatGPT on Search, Advertisement, and Media Consumption

For sure, the roll-out is not expected to be hurried. According to sources, it will be quite a while before the feature is integrated into Bing. However, there’s significant work behind the scenes to figure out a quick integration. While its deployment would solve some problems, it would inadvertently engender new ones. For example, ads might become more pervasive as a result. Remember that there’s just one textbox to get answers from once the question is asked. That gives the company a lot of real estate to work with. What if ChatGPT forced you to read a copywritten ad before you got your answer? Remember when we all thought it was ridiculous that YouTube forces us to watch ads? Now it’s the norm.

Another problem stems from the nature of the chatbot itself. It gives a response based on the data it’s provided. Garbage in, garbage out. Even the CEO of OpenAI, Sam Altman, tweeted last month about the limitation of the bot. In his words, ”… it’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important…”