Bard, Bing and Baidu: how big tech’s AI race will transform search – and all of computing
Today, if you want to find a good moving company, you might ask your favourite search engine – Google, Bing, or DuckDuckGo perhaps – for some advice.
After wading past half a page of adverts, you get a load of links to articles on moving companies. You click on one of the links and finally read about how to pick a good 'un. But not for much longer.
In a major reveal this week, Google announced plans to add its latest AI chatbot, LaMDA, to the Google search engine. The chatbot has been called the “Bard”.
I hope William Shakespeare's descendants sue. It's not the job of arguably the greatest writer of the English language to answer mundane questions about how to find a good moving company. But he will.
Ask the Bard how, and he will reply almost immediately with a logical eight-step plan: starting with reading reviews and getting quotes, and ending with taking up references.
No more wading through pages of links; the answer is immediate. To add Shakespearean insult to injury, you can even ask the Bard to respond in the form of a sonnet.
Microsoft responded swiftly to Google, saying it would incorporate the ChatGPT chatbot into its search engine, Bing.
It was only recently that Microsoft announced it would invest US$10 billion in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, on top of a previous investment of a billion or more in 2022.
ChatGPT has already been added to Microsoft's Teams software. You can expect it to turn up soon in Word, where it will write paragraphs for you. In Outlook it will compose entire emails, and in PowerPoint it will help you prepare slides for your next talk.
Not to be outdone, Chinese web giant Baidu has also sprung into action. It recently announced its latest chatbot would be released in March. Baidu's chatbot
Read more on tech.hindustantimes.com
