AI chatbots supercharge battle royale among web search titans

OpenAI's artificial intelligence-driven chatbot sensation — ChatGPT — is sending Big Tech companies into a frenzied competition to incorporate the service or roll out their own versions.

Alphabet and rival Microsoft are once again locked in a battle royale for internet dominance after the Google parent launched "Bard" on Monday to counter ChatGPT, which has Microsoft as a major investor.

Microsoft responded by holding an event to reveal its own AI bot at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, on Tuesday. It is based on OpenAI, but considered more powerful than ChatGPT, potentially setting the stage for the next browser battle of Google's Chrome versus Microsoft's Internet Explorer, or in the email space — Gmail versus Hotmail.

"It's a new day in search," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella at the event announcing that AI has been incorporated into the company's Bing search engine and Edge browser. "I think this technology is going to reshape pretty much every software category."

In an interview with CNBC on Tuesday, Nadella said: "I have not seen something like this since I would say 2007-2008, when the cloud was just first coming out."

Wedbush analyst Dan Ives on Tuesday called Microsoft's announcement the "first shot across the bow in this Big Tech AI battle".

Some analysts said AI-powered searches could help Bing siphon market share from Google, which controls around 90 percent of the search market, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Google began its counteroffensive on Monday with Bard.

Bard initially will be available exclusively to a group of "trusted testers" before being widely released later this year, Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a blog post on Monday.

ChatGPT has taken the tech world by storm since it was opened for public use last year, as people worldwide got creative with prompts that the conversational chatbot uses to create everything from poems to novels, jokes and film scripts.

Microsoft provided OpenAI with a $1 billion investment in 2019 and a second multiyear investment in January, reported to be $10 billion.

Main donors

OpenAI was founded in San Francisco in 2015 by Sam Altman, Reid Hoffman, Jessica Livingston, Elon Musk, Ilya Sutskever, Peter Thiel and others, who put up a total of $1 billion. The multibillionaire Musk, CEO of Twitter and SpaceX, resigned from the OpenAI board in 2018, but remained a donor.

In December, ChatGPT outperformed some students at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business on a final exam, Fox News Digital reported.

"The one thing I tell people is computers don't get tired. Computers don't have to turn off," NASA scientist Chris Mattmann told Fox.

The services that Bard and ChatGPT would offer are similar. Users will have to key in a question, a request or give a prompt to receive a humanlike response.

Bard is based on LaMDA, short for language model for dialogue applications. It generated text with such skill that a company engineer last year called it sentient, a claim the technology giant and scientists widely dismissed.

OpenAI's GPT, or generative pre-trained transformer, was first released in 2020, and the GPT 3.5 series of language models that finished training in early 2022 is the backbone of ChatGPT.

"ChatGPT sometimes writes plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers," OpenAI said in a blog post.

OpenAI made a free research preview of ChatGPT available for public use on Nov 30. In the two months after ChatGPT's launch, a number of tech companies have doubled down on generative AI technology, while several startups are independently working on their own projects.

China's Baidu, which is usually compared to Google, is the latest company to join the chatbot chase with its AI bot Ernie.

Agencies contributed to this story.