Satya Nadella wants to make Google dance in battle for AI chat-powered web search

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has been waiting for the chance to challenge Google's dominance of internet search, and just might have finally pulled it off this week with the launch of AI-powered Bing. Both companies believe language model chatbots will be the new interface of search. Instead of sifting through information …

[Catkin]

Getty skating on thin ice

They have a nasty habit of hoovering up public domain images and trying to sell them.

[Filippo]

>If you make workers more productive, workers are then supposed to make more money.

That sentence is correct. Unfortunately, that thing that is supposed to happen, is not happening. Economists, it's your job to figure out a way to fix that.

[yetanotheraoc]

finish the sentence

"If you make workers more productive, workers are then supposed to make more money" for the company.

There, that's better. Economists, you can go back to your tea break.

[Anonymous Coward]

If I'm searching for something, why should I want an AI summarize it for me?

If I'm looking for something there are good reasons I want to get to the original source. not that I want a summary delivered thinking about semi-analphabet people.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: If I'm searching for something, why should I want an AI summarize it for me?

Yeah, but instant gratification...

[mark l 2]

The problem I can see for Google (and I guess this will also effect Bing to) is by integrating a chat bot to answer search queries rather than a list of website results for a search term, is that both Alphabet and Microsoft make there money from their search engines from websites paying for ads to appear at the top for certain search terms. But if people never need to click on a link through to a website because the chat bot just gives them the answer, then the number of clicks on the ads will go way down, and therefore their revenue from search.

I suspect this might be why Google had not planned to launch a chatbot powered search yet until they could figure out how to monetize it. But MS announcing integration of ChatGPT into Bing forced Googles hand early. And since Bing probably doesn't bring in anywhere near as much revenue for MS as Google search does for Alphabet, they could afford for a drop in ad revenue if it will bring some extra visitors through to Bing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Chat bot for input

Having tried the new Bing, it seems that the chat bot is mainly being used to parse the input, not to obscure the link results. I tried asking questions where the chat bot would be helpful, e.g. where you can't recall a key term but only know the situation it is relevant for, and it was quite good at returning relevant results. So I have to admit it's pretty promising, to the extent I've added Bing to my favourites bar (even if my default browser page is still google).

[Anonymous Coward]

> "If you make workers more productive, workers are then supposed to make more money. Companies don't want to have a discussion about sharing the benefits of these technologies. They'd rather have a discussion to scare the bejesus out of you about these new technologies. They want you to concede that you're just grateful to have a job and that you'll [get paid] peanuts."

This isn't evidence of income inequality increasing. If you're more productive, you can do more work for the same effort. If that makes you more valuable, ask for a raise. If it doesn't, hope for a raise. Either way the customer gets a cheaper product, which we all win from eventually.