Microsoft is making an OpenAI powered version of Bing

(Image Courtesy: Reuters)

Microsoft is working on an AI-powered version of Bing, its internet search engine.

According to sources close to publication, The Information, the Redmond technology giant will integrate technology behind OpenAI's ChatGPT into the search engine.

ChatGPT is a conversational bot developed by OpenAI. It specializes in understanding and responding to natural human language. The AI bot has been extremely popular online.

In 2019, Microsoft and Artificial Intelligence (AI) research laboratory OpenAI announced a partnership to extend its Azure platform's AI capabilities.

OpenAI would receive a funding of $1 billion as part of the deal, and Microsoft would expand its large-scale AI systems as part of Azure.

Then, in a blog post last year, Microsoft announced that it would integrate OpenAI's DALL-E 2 into Azure's OpenAI service. The company said that it would also integrate DALL-E's capabilities into the Image Creator in its search engine Bing.

DALL-E is an AI based image generation tool. It can generate images based on text prompts like "a teapot in the shape of an avocado" or "a koala dunking a basketball".

According to The Information's sources, as early as March this year. Microsoft hopes that this will give Bing some much needed momentum in competing with Google.

As per statcounter, a web traffic analysis website, Google accounted for 92.57% of the total search engine market in December 2022.

Yahoo had 1.24%, Yandex 1%, Baidu 0.72% and DuckDuckGo had 0.58%.

Microsoft's Bing account for 3.04% of the market share. On desktops, Microsoft's share jumped up to 8.95% and it had 4.99% of the market when it came to searches on tablets.

On mobile, Bing completely falls off the charts with a minute share of 0.5%. Microsoft will be hoping to entice new users with OpenAI's ChatGPT technology in the fold.

The search engine market presents lucrative advertising and promotional opportunities. Even with the slight market share Bing has, Microsoft managed a revenue of 11.59 billion in global search advertising, in FY2022.