Yahoo Finance Microsoft (MSFT) Might Block AI Rivals From Using Bing Search
Microsoft MSFT has reportedly warned two Bing-powered search engines that it will revoke access to the index if they use it as a foundation for rival AI chatbots, per a Bloomberg report. The company doesn’t want its rivals to use Bing’s search index to power their AI chatbots.
This Zacks Rank #3 (Hold) company believes that using Bing’s data in this way is a violation of its contract and it may choose to terminate its agreements with the search engines accused of misusing the information. You can see the complete list of today's Zacks #1 Rank (Strong Buy) stocks here.
Microsoft and Alphabet’s GOOGL Google are the only two companies that index the entire web and Google's limitations on the use of its index have led nearly all other search engines to use Bing.
Last week, Microsoft launched its new image-creation tool for its browser, Edge and search engine, Bing. This new tool is created by OpenAI’s DALL-E to generate pictures based on texts. The tool, Bing Image Creator, will be available in the latest versions of Edge and Bing. It would be initially available in Creative mode for desktop and mobile users.
With more companies like Google introducing its takes on OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot, Microsoft wants to make its own search data exclusive to Bing’s chatbot. The tool is already powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4, the latest and most powerful version of the company’s language model and is capable of answering various questions, creating summaries, generating code, writing social media posts and more.
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Web Search Engines That Might Face Trouble
Microsoft licenses the data in its Bing search index — a map of the Internet that can be quickly scanned in real time — to other companies that offer web search, such as Apollo Global Management's Yahoo, DuckDuckGo and AI search engine You.com.
DuckDuckGo, You.com and Neeva's regular search engines use Bing to provide some of their information, because indexing the entire web is costly and it requires servers to store data and a constant crawl of the Internet to incorporate updates. It would be similarly complex and pricey to get together that data for a search chatbot.
Last month, DuckDuckGo launched DuckAssist, a tool that provides AI-generated summaries from Wikipedia and other sources for certain searches. You.com and Neeva, which debuted in 2021, have also launched AI-fueled search services, YouChat and NeevaAI.
These search chatbots aim to combine the conversational skills of ChatGPT with the information provided by a conventional search engine.
Other Tech Giants Making Noise Within AI
Last week, Google launched Bard as an experiment and currently it is available with limited access for selected users in the United States and United Kingdom. Bard is characterized as a product that enables the collaboration of users with generative AI.
Given this upbeat scenario, not only Microsoft and Google but also other tech giants like Amazon AMZN and Baidu BIDU are making concerted efforts to capitalize on the abovementioned growth opportunities.
Baidu also introduced its AI-powered chatbot called Ernie Bot, which marks the first Chinese contender of ChatGPT. Notably, Ernie Bot is capable of solving mathematics queries, responding to questions regarding Chinese literature and generating images and videos.
Meanwhile, Amazon has released its own language model that is claimed to be better than the OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 in terms of performance in ScienceQA — a large set of multimodal science questions with annotated answers.
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