Hello, and welcome to another blog post! We do hope you’re enjoying your time here at the CloudQ blog, and we also hope you’re getting some good information. Today, we’ll be outlining some of the highlights from Tuesday’s press conference about Bing and OpenAI’s partnership with Microsoft. If you missed the news, you can start here by looking at the New Bing screenshots a random user took when the software was accidentally made live:
Hopefully, you knew about the public trial for the technology that was running yesterday and got to check it out for yourself, too.
If you’re ready to dive into the details, get comfy, and get your clicking finger ready, because you’re about to take a wild ride. Some of this sounds like it’s right out of a sci-fi film, but I assure you, it’s all very real. Let’s get to it!
The Verge was on scene, live blogging at the event yesterday, and I happened to be watching like a hawk. Everyone in IT wants to know what’s coming, naturally, so I figured I’d get the information and pass it along. I took a number of snippets from their feed, and those are what we’ll be talking about. If you’d like to read everything that was said, you can do so here. Everything we discuss will come directly from that live blog and a couple of other posts regarding the AI tech.
One of the things that caught my attention near the end of the discussion was that Microsoft and OpenAI have been working on this search function since 2017. I was gob smacked because I had no idea these kinds of things were in the works that long ago. Of course, it shouldn’t have come as a surprise, but it totally knocked my socks off when I read it. Technology like this doesn’t just emerge from nowhere, after all. When you think about it, Office has already gotten some AI (and I didn’t think about it until I read this post), but it totally makes sense. You know that little suggestion for completing your sentences when you’re writing in Word? That’s the AI hard at work.
Microsoft performed a demo yesterday and asked the AI search a couple of cool questions:
- pros and cons of the top three vacuums
- egg substitutes
- if an Ikea loveseat will fit into a minivan
What’s cool about these is, not only did the AI return answers, but if you had the make of the minivan, it could pull dimensions of that and the loveseat, so you get an accurate answer. Egg substitutes came with changes in the baked item listed out, and when the demonstrator asked the AI to create a meal plan for a family of four with vegetarian options and caters to people who don’t like nuts, the AI not only came up with meals, but it also made a shopping list.
If that doesn’t get you excited, I have to wonder what planet you live on and what search you’ve been using in the past. If it’s cooler than this, well…
Since Google became the go-to for search about thirty-or-so years ago, not a lot has changed. Sure, they do updates to how they crawl sites, return results, grade content, and collect SEO data, but the basic idea of search is the same. New Bing—which is what Microsoft is calling it—will change everything. Will it be for better or worse? We have yet to see.
It can translate into 100 languages, and it can take code written for Python and change it to another language or write it in another program, too. So, yeah, this includes coding languages. We also learned, during this live blog, that it can compare quarterly reports from companies and spit out the exact numbers in seconds.
Here’s the kicker though: It’s not powered by ChatGPT as you know it. This is a whole new model, and a lot of people are referring to it as GPT-5. It’s smarter, faster, and does a ton more fact checking than before. If you’ve followed the snafus with ChatGPT and it stating things that are false as fact, you’ll understand.
It’s likely they needed fodder to feed the new AI, so they allowed ChatGPT out into the world before launch so the AI could become smarter by absorbing things people told it. Not a bad idea, in my humble opinion. I do wonder how many things it will use that will have creative license attached to it that just won’t get caught because it’s such a brief viewing of the content.
Now, here’s another tidbit you might have missed that could very well blow your mind: Google just announced that they’ll be rolling out their own new AI search function in a month or so. They’re calling it Bard, and we’ll get more information about that next week at their press release.
Hence, the battle of AI search has begun.
This isn’t the end of the road for AI. Microsoft has big plans to integrate the technology into other things like Xbox, Office, and Windows—of course. So, even if you’re not interested in it, want nothing to do with it, or are afraid of it, you’ll be interacting with it eventually.
Keep your eyes on this space, because we fully intend to dive more deeply into everything AI, and we’ll keep going on the Metaverse. Why? Because they’ll be playing together soon. After all, Microsoft owns Minecraft.
That’s all for this post! While you’re here, be sure and check out some of our other content. You won’t be sorry you did. Until next time!
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