ChatGPT will Now have Bing Search Engine Built-In

Microsoft announces integration of Bing Search into ChatGPT to provide more up-to-date answers 

Microsoft said Tuesday that it will offer Bing as the default search engine in OpenAI's viral ChatGPT chatbot to provide more relevant and potentially new responses. It's the latest tie-up between the two companies, which are at the center of the boom in generative artificial intelligence. Bing will serve as the "default search experience", allowing ChatGPT to retrieve answers from the internet and provide citations. Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI and is using the startup's AI chatbot technology inside search, email, Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, and now to analyze data.

"This is just the start of what we plan to do with our partners in OpenAI to bring the best of Bing to the ChatGPT experience," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said onstage at Microsoft's Build conference in Seattle on Tuesday.

In addition to cash, OpenAI relies on Microsoft's Azure cloud for computing needs. In tandem, the companies are taking on Google, which has developed its own generative AI models for search and other products and is also investing heavily in startups in the space.

With the latest announcement, subscribers to the ChatGPT Plus service will be able to add Bing search by enabling a plugin, Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft's consumer marketing chief, wrote in a blog post. Users of ChatGPT's free service will soon be able to do the same.

"ChatGPT will now have a world-class search engine built-in to provide timelier and more up-to-date answers with access from the web," Mehdi wrote. "Now, ChatGPT answers can be grounded by search and web data and include citations so you can learn more — all directly from within the chat."

ChatGPT previously relied solely on individual plugins to access any recent information.

The other new Bing updates are focused on plugins, such as a single platform for developers to create and submit plugins for ChatGPT, Bing, Microsoft 365 Copilot, and others.

OpenAI sought to extend the capability of ChatGPT when it announced the concept of plugins in March. Expedia, Instacart, Shopify, and Slack are among the online services that have launched plugins, but there's a waitlist for others who want to join.