Prof. Toby Walsh “Bard, Bing and Baidu: how big tech’s AI race will transform search – and all of computing”: “When Microsoft launched Windows, it was the start of a revolution. Rather than typing cryptic instructions, we could just point and click on a screen. That revolution continued with the launch of Apple’s iPhone – an interface that shrunk computers and the web into the palm of our hand. Perhaps the biggest impact from AI-driven search tools will be on how we interact with the myriad ever-smarter devices in our lives. We will stop pointing, clicking and touching, and will instead start having entire conversations with our devices. We can only speculate on what this might mean in the longer term. But, for better or worse, how we interact with computers is about to change.” Link

“Will it give Microsoft a chance to overtake Google in the search space?

It was only recently that Microsoft announced it would invest US$10 billion in OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, on top of a previous investment of a billion or more in 2022.

ChatGPT has already been added to Microsoft’s Teams software. You can expect it to turn up soon in Word, where it will write paragraphs for you. In Outlook it will compose entire emails, and in PowerPoint it will help you prepare slides for your next talk.

Not to be outdone, Chinese web giant Baidu has also sprung into action. It recently announced its latest chatbot would be released in March. Baidu’s chatbot is will be trained on 50% more parameters than ChatGPT, and will be bilingual. The company’s share price jumped 15% in response.”