Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has reportedly seen a new opportunity to challenge Google’s leadership in the search engine market as the company adds OpenAI’s artificial intelligence technology to its Bing search engine.
The 55-year-old Microsoft executive has waited a long time. Satya Nadella was in charge of engineering development at Microsoft when it developed the Bing search engine in the mid-00s when Microsoft tried hard to win market share but to little avail. This time, Satya Nadella said Tuesday, Google’s advantage as the current leader will become less important.
Satya Nadella said Microsoft’s artificial intelligence model for the search engine, Prometheus, uses the same technology as ChatGPT developed by OpenAI and will greatly optimize Bing’s search results. The new Bing can talk to users and even help them compose emails and other content.
Google isn’t staying put, however. The company said Monday that its conversational artificial intelligence service Bard will be open to trusted users to test, and Google will be ready to publicly launch the platform “in the coming weeks. In an interview, Satya Nadella said, “The search industry as a whole is facing huge changes right now. Opportunities like this don’t come along very often.”
Here are the key takeaways from Satya Nadella’s interview on the future of artificial intelligence and the search engine industry.
Q: Search engine technology has not changed much for a long time, what’s happening now?
Satya Nadella: The opportunity to rethink search engines rarely presents itself. The current situation is somewhat like what Google did between the development of AltaVista to Google Search Engine, the opportunity has re-emerged. So I call it the first day of a whole new competition.
Q: Does Google’s lead matter in the new search engine world?
Satya Nadella: Google is the “800-pound gorilla” here. The exciting thing is that they have to innovate. It’s a new paradigm. In this new era, search engine innovation has returned to the front lines. It’s wonderful to see the competition renewed in the largest software category with the best economics.
It’s also good for users, publishers, advertisers and vendors. Ultimately, only the companies that can reinvent themselves will maintain their market position. You need to keep reinventing yourself, and as for Google, I’m pretty sure Google is thinking about what it’s going to do to maintain its market position.
Q: What other areas will artificial intelligence disrupt?
Satya Nadella: What has Microsoft done right in the 48 years since the company was founded? It’s our ability to make transformations in the face of important trends. In some cases, we’ve succeeded, in others we haven’t. The transition to mobile computing, for example, was one that we obviously missed. Our last success was in cloud computing. We also successfully completed the transition from PCs to servers and had more success in the transition to the Internet. That’s what we need to go for.
It’s important to ask yourself, “Do you have the ability to rethink when you see change?” This means we have to keep our feet on the ground; results don’t come easily. Take Azure, for example. What excited me most about Azure about 4 years ago was the task of rethinking how Azure, using AI training and reasoning, works. That brought us and OpenAI together over time.
Q: What might Microsoft bring to the table in this space?
Satya Nadella: I’ve announced that at Microsoft we will be aggressively applying this technology to all of our businesses. It’s like Microsoft in the early 90s, I hope every day we come up with a new business or redefine some business.
Q: Will Microsoft’s software be labeled that the content was created or edited with the aid of artificial intelligence?
Satya Nadella: It’s an interesting topic to see how much of the future content is unedited by AI. If someone said, “Satya Nadella, send me documents that haven’t had any AI intervention,” I would be overwhelmed. No one can read what I’ve written thanks to the AI spell check.
So, should I make the markup? In a cultural sense, it’s still very early days. I’m not trying to downplay the issue, because it’s really important. Should we go through the markup to show that a large part of this is AI-assisted editing?
Q: What’s the first thing you try when using the new Bing?
Satya Nadella: In the summer of 2022, I saw the current generation of models for the first time. Growing up, I always dreamed of reading the works of the Persian poet Rumi. In the past, you needed to translate these poems first into Urdu and then later into English. You used to have to jump between multiple websites to complete the translation, but now you can do it in one step.
