ChatGPT will now use Bing as its built-in search data provider, Microsoft announced today as part of a slew of Build 2023 announcements.
And while the Google faithful or average ChatGPT user may say that Bing is not their search engine of choice, this integration gives ChatGPT a big upgrade in the form of answers based on information from later than 2021. The limitation has been a big drawback of standard ChatGPT, especially in today’s world of swiftly changing circumstances and developments in technology, politics, and nearly every other field of knowledge.
Bing AI is rolling out to ChatGPT Plus subscribers starting today, and will be available to free users soon via a plugin that brings Bing to ChatGPT, Microsoft says.
ChatGPT Was Built On Azure
At Build, coding guru Scott Guthrie, Microsoft’s EVP for Cloud and AI, reminded developers that ChatGPT is developed and hosted on Azure, Microsoft’s cloud Developer platform. And there are good reasons for this. Not least is Microsoft’s developer tools, which contribute to the effectiveness of AI coding thanks to helpers like GitHub Copilot and more similar tools coming to Visual Studio. These will, ironically, only get better thanks to ChatGPT.
Azure doesn’t have as much name recognition as Amazon’s AWS or Google Cloud, but it can boast even more unique features not found in the others. Guthrie noted that Azure is the only major cloud infrastructure that supports two Nvidia technologies, both of which boost AI computation. The first is Nvidia Hopper, a class of 80-billion-transistor, 4nm GPUs designed to accelerate AI workloads. The other is InfiniBand Quantum-2 400Gbps networking.
At the time of the partnership last fall, Guthrie was quoted as saying, “Our collaboration with Nvidia unlocks the world’s most scalable supercomputer platform, which delivers state-of-the-art AI capabilities for every enterprise on Microsoft Azure.”
Guthrie described how Azure data centers are legion and worldwide, noting that despite all this massive computing activity, the company is still committed to its goal of becoming carbon-negative by 2030, and to eventually reverse all the company’s carbon emissions from its founding in 1975. I would note that that goal certainly doesn’t include all the PCs in the world running Microsoft software.
The Industrial Metaverse
The metaverse has fallen out of favor in the tech world of late, so I was surprised to see it make an appearance in the Build keynote. Another collaboration between Nvidia and Microsoft Azure resulted in Nvidia Omniverse, basically a metaverse for manufacturing. Guthrie showed it being used at a BMW “virtual factory.” The system takes advantage of digital twins, representations of real-world objects that can take advantage of Internet of Things technology (there’s another term that’s lost much of its buzzworthiness).
Build Once, Run on a Copilot or ChatGPT
Azure AI Studio is a newly announced tool that will let developers “ground” conversational AI models in their own data. What that means is that the chatbot’s answers will be relevant to the developer’s data. The new tool works with Azure OpenAI Service and ChatGPT and GPT-4 models. One demo during Guthrie’s Build keynote gave the example of the AI knowing what was in a customer’s web shopping cart in order to suggest related purchases. But it could be used for medical, legal, or other specialty grounding.
Developers can build plugins using the same Azure code whether they deploy it to either Microsoft 365 Copilot or to ChatGPT. The company said there are already over 50 Copilot plugins available, with examples developed by OpenTable and Wolfram Alpha. Microsoft also will have Expedia, Instacart, Kayak, Klarna, Redfin, and Zillow.
Also new and of interest to many is Azure AI Content Safety, which prevents inappropriate queries to custom-built AI chatbots. Filtered content includes severity ratings in customizable categories like violence, self harm, and so on. In one of the few pricing mentions for Azure features, Microsoft press materials stated that usage of the service “begins June 1, 2023, and will be priced at $1.50 per 1K images, and $0.75 per 1K text records.”
In his keynote, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella alluded to Steve Jobs idea that computers are like bicycles for the mind, adding that AI moves us to a steam engine for the mind. Though some fear AI, especially generative AI, taking us to that next acceleration of the mind could result in real positives, and safeguards can be put in place that make it a welcome advancement.