According to a Bloomberg article, Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) has reportedly told two Bing-powered search engines that it will revoke access to the index if they use it as the basis for competing AI chatbots. The company does not want its competitors’ AI chatbots to be powered by Bing’s search index.

Microsoft considers this use of Bing’s data to be a breach of its contract and may decide to sever its relationships with the search engines it holds accountable for misusing the data. 

Microsoft and Alphabet’s (NASDAQ:GOOGL) Google are the only two firms that index the entire web, and due to Google’s restrictions on the usage of its index, almost all other search engines now utilize Bing.

Microsoft unveiled its brand-new image-creation tool for its Edge browser and Bing search engine last week. DALL-E from OpenAI developed this new technology to produce images from texts. The most recent versions of Edge and Bing will have the Bing Image Maker function. It would initially be accessible to desktop and mobile users in Creative mode.

Microsoft wants to make its own search data unique to Bing’s chatbot since other firms, like Google, are releasing their versions of OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot. The tool can already answer a variety of queries, produce summaries, generate code, write social media posts, and more thanks to OpenAI’s GPT-4, the most recent and potent iteration of the company’s language model.

Web Search Engines That May Experience Issues

Microsoft licenses the information in its Bing search index, a quick-scan version of the Internet, to other businesses that provide web search services, including Apollo Global Management’s Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, and AI search engine You.com.

Because indexing the entire web is expensive, it necessitates servers to store data, and it necessitates a continuous crawl of the Internet to incorporate updates, DuckDuckGo, You.com, and Neeva’s regular search engines use Bing to provide some of their information. It would be similarly complex and pricey to get together that data for a search chatbot.

The tool DuckAssist, which offers AI-generated summaries from Wikipedia and other sources for specific searches, was introduced by DuckDuckGo last month. YouChat and NeevaAI, both of which debuted in 2021, are AI-powered search services that were also introduced by You.com and Neeva.

These search chatbots seek to integrate ChatGPT’s conversational capabilities with the data offered by a traditional search engine.

Various Tech Giants Making Waves in AI

Google released Bard as an experiment last week, and at the moment, a small number of people in the United States and the United Kingdom can access it. Bard is marketed as a product that enables user and generative AI collaboration.

Given this optimistic scenario, Microsoft, and Google aren’t the only ones to benefit. Tech giants like Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) and Baidu (NASDAQ:BIDU) are working diligently to take advantage of the aforementioned development prospects.

The first Chinese competitor to ChatGPT, Ernie Bot, a chatbot powered by AI, was also unveiled by Baidu. Notably, Ernie Bot can generate images and videos, answer questions about Chinese literature, and resolve math problems.

In the meantime, Amazon has made available its own language model that, according to the company, performs better than OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 in ScienceQA, a sizable database of multimodal science questions and their annotated solutions.

Featured Image: Pixabay @ efes

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