The IT group presents the integration of artificial intelligence into its Internet search engine Bing.
At Microsoft headquarters, CEO Satya Nadella proclaimed the dawn of a new internet age on Tuesday. Company bosses like to exaggerate in their product presentations. In this case, however, the improved systems based on artificial intelligence (AI) should actually herald the dawn of a new information age. We are experiencing the next iPhone moment.
As with the iPhone, the basic technology is not new. Smartphones existed before Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone in 2007. But the Apple cell phone made the new Beatrix technology accessible to millions of end users and really suitable for everyday use.
We are currently experiencing the same thing with artificial intelligence. With the ChatGPT system, the start-up OpenAI has launched a language model that can write poems, design business models or write computer programs using simple inputs. Microsoft is now bringing the technology behind it to millions of customers via its search engine Bing.
It’s a welcome innovation. Billions for digital delivery services or for e-scooters, which were hardly used later, have hardly helped us as a society. Things are different with the new AI systems.
It is not yet clear whether Microsoft will remain the dominant company in this area. Google is the company that developed the technical foundations for the systems on which OpenAI and Microsoft are built today. With Bard, Google has also announced a comparable system – as has the Chinese technology group Baidu.
>> Read here: “The beginning of a new era” – Microsoft is radically redesigning Internet search
It is already foreseeable what revolution will be triggered by artificial intelligence. The systems master human language. You can also produce impressive images, compose music or create videos.
These systems are expected to radically change how the Internet works. So far, search engines have only accompanied us to the appropriate websites. In the future, we should be spending a lot more time with our AI utilities themselves. To get essential information, users no longer have to leave the search engines. Systems like Bing or Bard present results that come from many different sources.
This makes these systems even more powerful than search engines are today. And that increases the risk of abuse. The systems are not yet reliable, invent sources and produce incorrect results. It remains to be hoped that these problems will be resolved soon.