What you need to know
- Microsoft highlighted the fact that Bing will be the default search experience of ChatGPT.
- Integration with Bing will allow ChatGPT to give timely answers based on the web.
- ChatGPT will show citations of its web sources to allow people to find out more information.
- Bing's integration with ChatGPT is available for ChatGPT Plus subscribers starting today and will ship to free users in the future through a plugin.
Microsoft discussed its growing partnership with OpenAI at Build 2023. It was already known that Bing would become the default search engine of ChatGPT, bringing Microsoft's search engine to 100 million reported monthly users of OpenAI's chatbot, but Microsoft reemphasized the expansion at this week's developer conference. Bing will also greatly expand the capabilities of ChatGPT by bringing real-time information from the web to the tool.
ChatGPT is powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model (LLM). GPT-4 is powerful, but it is limited because it was only trained on data up to a certain point. Microsoft got around this limit with Prometheus, which combines ChatGPT with Bing search information. OpenAI appears to be taking a similar approach by integrating ChatGPT with Bing, though the exact method of the integration has not been shared at this time.
The new integration with ChatGPT is already rolling out to ChatGPT Plus subscribers. Free users will be able to use similar functionality through a plugin that brings Bing to ChatGPT.
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If ChatGPT plus real-time data from Bing sounds familiar, it's because Bing Chat already incorporates information with the web with OpenAI's GPT-4. Bing Chat and ChatGPT have quite a bit of overlap, which is unsurprising considering the close partnership between OpenAI and Microsoft. The two chatbots even share a plugin ecosystem, as announced by Microsoft today.
While ChatGPT and Bing Chat share many features, there's still a place for both tools. As the two chatbots are made by different companies, OpenAI and Microsoft can push the tools and roll out new functionality. ChatGPT also has the option for a paid subscription for faster access and priority access.
Additionally, some people prefer chatbots, even when using similar features. Our Managing Editor, Richard Devine, dropped ChatGPT Plus because of Bing. The first comment on that article shares the opposite opinion.
