Have you ever found yourself trawling through endless pages of results on a search engine to find the answer to a complex question? Say you want to find out if a vegetarian diet is suitable for your dog. Your research journey might begin by hopping onto Google and typing "is a veg diet good for dogs" into the search box and then having to make sense of the legion of generated links. By the time you find an answer, you've sunk way more time than you'd budgeted into poring through articles, reports and their sources.
In the not-so-distant future, finding the answer to a complex question might not be such a tedious, mind-numbing process. Microsoft is reportedly integrating the AI tech that underlies ChatGPT into its Bing search engine in a move that could transform search as we know it. More specifically, Bing might have the potential to serve up a search experience that's superior to Google, according to AI researchers, and potentially usurp the search giant's decades-long dominance.
"ChatGPT is the first new technology in more than a decade that may really transform search and that could, at least in principle, upend Google's market dominance," said Anton Korinek, an AI researcher and professor of economics, at the University of Virginia. "What the technology does is that it allows consumers to interact with their computer in a much more natural and conversational form than traditional search."
At this point, we don't know what Bing's AI-driven search results might look like exactly. Microsoft declined to comment for this story. However, AI researchers expect a meaningful departure from the status quo in terms of how a search engine presents an answer and how users interact with it. After all, ChatGPT is not designed to browse the internet for information (like a search engine). Instead, the chatbot uses information studied from vast swaths of training data to generate a response.
"ChatGPT can answer its users with a single clear response compared to the myriads of links of traditional search engines. It also has capabilities that are far beyond traditional search engines, like [the ability] to generate new text, explain concepts, have a back-and-forth conversation between the user and the system, and so on," said Korinek. "People still find emergent capabilities that even the creators of ChatGPT were not aware that the system had."