Microsoft just announced a media event taking place tomorrow with OpenAI | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft just announced a media event taking place tomorrow with OpenAI

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This is a real grab-the-popcorn moment. If Microsoft is about to slam GPT into Bing it could be their best moment to steal market share from Google in decades. Few a few glorious weeks, the world would be talking about Bing search. Google is desperately trying to get ahead of that. You can practically see them pushing each other out of the way to get through the door first.

Not surprising Google announced their AI ambitions with BARD, they're feeling the heat. I love the competition, I just hope it doesn't end up lopsided with a clear winner that takes all.

Definitely! It would be nice to be back where there was no dominant search player and you had half dozen "able" solutions. In this scenario maybe some would have different biases (general, business, parental supervision, no-guardrails, etc)

Out of curiosity would this the one one of the emps characterized as "sentient"?

that's exactly opposite of consumer behavior, people want simple experience they can trust. That's why google and amazon are so popular, even with their flaws, no one wants to scan multiple different providers to get a simple answer/item.

I guess. But many people shot NewEgg and ebay as well.

Not everyone want's the "correct" version of the internet either. Some or many will want a firehose for themselves and a filtered version for their kids, etc.

End consumers don't care. This is the thing. We live in a total bubble. While for us this is really interesting, the long tail don't care. We're going to see over the coming years how this plays out. Redefining the search format is a good first step, whether or not it will lead to stronger adoption of the Bing search product is not clear.

i heard random old folks in the cafe i like to work at talking about chatGPT.

it's not a niche topic in the slightest little bit. if the defacto location for using chatGPT becomes bing.com (or whatever rebranding) that's huge.

My friend’s college age kids are using ChatGPT for dating app conversations. Illinois and Iowa colleges.

Bringing ChatGPT to Bing would be similar to what GitHub did for MS’ DevRel.

I love that because I have heard similar anecdotes about using ChatGPT to respond to coworkers. In the end it will just be ChatGPT talking to itself on Tinder and Slack.

My dad is a doctor who is now using chatGPT to respond to questions from his residents. It only works half the time or so, but he will consistently put their question in to see how ot does.

HIPAA?

There's no patient health information here...

> dating app conversations

I'm screaming internally at this.

I hadn't even thought of that, but now you say it, it's very plausible. It writes convincingly, avoids controversy, and with extensive but imperfect knowledge in far more domains than any real human, of course people will use it for dating.

Now someone just has to come up with a chatGPT powered sex toy to cut out the middleman.

My 70+ year old mom has been talking about ChatGPT these last 2 weeks as if she were a fanboy (I think she absolutely loves the sound of the name), she wouldn't know if she had Edge open and doesn't know that one can use browser tabs.

When asked if she tried it, she not only didn't even realize that it was accessible to her, but didn't even bother to register to actually try it.

If Microsoft is smart about it, they call it "Microsoft Search with ChatGPT", do their "we'll place you a shortcut on your desktop without asking"-thing with an icon named "ChatGPT" which launches Edge even if Chrome or FFX is the default, and shows the "Microsoft Search with ChatGPT" page with an auto-submitted question like "If animals could talk, which species do you think would be the funniest to have a conversation with and why?".

Let them ask a few questions and finally ask them if they want to set Edge as their new default browser.

She loves the sound of the name? Is there a clever way to say it I’m missing? I’ve never heard it out loud and always assumed it’s Chat Gee Pee Tee.

I think it's just an endearing quirk of his (likely) elderly mother.

Elide the Gee to Eee and you have Chatty Petey?

I believe Chachipiti sounds like something a little girl could say over and over again during the day.

Another interesting thing is that she calls Google's recommendation engine "Adam". It's "Adam" who selects the photos which get shown in "this day a year ago" and other automatically generated collections. "Adam" is what makes Google smart for her, the restless data collector and invader of privacy.

And this is why we need an ethical code of conduct for programmers.

maybe she's just being excited about it because it's something she can talk and relate to you about?

It would be substantially better than Google search, so it would grab share quickly. I don't see it happening though. According to Sundar's blog post, even Google doesn't have the hardware to run ChatGPT at web search qps scale.

If they pull it off, Sundar's Bard blog post would be a huge egg-on-face moment for Google, even bigger than when DeepMind said it would make a Go announcement soon and Zuck tried to steal its thunder. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/jan/28/go-playin...

ChatGPT hits estimated 100 million monthly active users.

Pretty sure every student heard of it and many of them tried it.

Consumers don't care what it's called, but they surely will use it. Especially if it's built into a familiar search engine.

You're right. End consumers don't care. Which is why Microsoft will stuff it into the desktop search. Users will just type and ChatGPT has customers. They won't know what it's called or care that it even exists but they'll be using it.

called something better than Cortana probably

HN thinking it's some sort of secret club involved in issues that nobody normal is actually concerned about is the most insular thing that HN does. Yes, people are concerned about privacy and AI.

Yep. You're absolutely right. It'll be really difficult for people to switch to bing just because they added chatGPT or something along those lines.

Google doesn't have any competition outside the US and the EU.

It sounds like you might live in a particular bubble, because if anything I find my computer nerd friends a bit dismissive, overall, while everyone else loves this shit.

People mostly use Google to find ChatGPT website

People will still look for ChatGPT website

They won't look for "Bing" to use ChatGPT

It's similar with Edge, even after they moved to Chromium, most people use it to download Chrome

Google will soon release their own ChatGPT, so it's already game over for Bing

Microsoft didn't make ChatGPT, so there is no brand fidelity among ChatGPT users

And if you use ChatGPT, you don't need to use Bing or Google, it's just a web app; once you found it, you don't need to look for it again, you bookmark it, or it's in your browser history and accessible from your address bar

I don't understand this movement to promote Microsoft/Bing, when the star of the show is ChatGPT itself, ChatGPT makes Google/Bing useless to begin with

>People mostly use Google to find ChatGPT website People will still look for ChatGPT website

On that note, couldnt Google just show bongs ChatGPT results? I suppose there are probably some legal issues there.

I dunno, my search results usually decrease in quality when a bong is involved

> They won't look for "Bing" to use ChatGPT

No insider knowledge, but it would seem a marketing snafu to go down that route. ChatGPT has brand awareness: Microsoft has exclusive access to ChatGPT. They've been canny with Github by _not_ branding it Microsoft.

>And if you use ChatGPT, you don't need to use Bing or Google

Indeed. So how can Microsoft disintermediate Google given they don't own either the browser or current internet search? Windows is one possibility: integrate ChatGPT direct into Windows search. The market certainly isn't as big as mobile - but it's not small either.

All speculation obviously. I'll have the popcorn out too.

Perhaps they could anthropomorphize the language model through some kind of playful character related to office tasks.

How about a paper clip?

If they bring back Clippy, I might return to Windows.

The thing is, before it’ll answer your first question, it makes you apologize for making fun of it all these years. And the words you give it had better resemble sincerity.

Chat-Clippy-T

Maybe a choose your own assistant. Cortana, Clippy, BonziBuddy, Peedy (the green parrot), Hoverbot (robot), Scribble (cat), PowerPup, BOB. Would anyone be around to sue if Microsoft added a purple gorilla to bing?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Agent

It is pretty amazing that there has been almost 25 years of attempts at this, and they have all been terrible, and suddenly overnight the world is enthralled because one works.

Microsoft being good at marketing! What a dreamy world that would be eh.

MS being MS I believe they will take the stupidest decision possible. And Google will take over with their Bard.

I mean this chatGPT thing isn't even that useful. I find it super weird that people are using it. Considering it's not accurate and the amount of guardrails, I find it a bit odd. But I love writing and I know how to write so maybe that's on me.

It’s because Microsoft bought half of OpenAI. Practically speaking, OpenAI is Microsoft’s AI product development lab. If Microsoft wants Bing to be the sole public interface to GPT, I promise you they have the leverage to make that happen.

And if you use ChatGPT, you don't need to use Bing or Google, it's just a web app; once you found it, you don't need to look for it again

I just looked it up (never used it before), and it’s a “sign up” button behind a “try it” button on a landing page. You’re a HN user, but 95% of average internet users simply close the tab at this point.

ChatGPT offered and available right away in a browser urlsearch bar will make a revolution for a browser that does it.

Meta: ignoring nuances like this may make otherwise perfect and well-designed products CRASH. “It’s just few clicks away” puts an umbrella over your funnel.

You're not wrong in general, but it's now at 100 million active users, and they clearly weren't expecting that rate of growth.

This is how I thought askjeeves worked when I was 10.

What’s really funny about this is that the answer to “what’s the meaning of life?” on Ask Jeeves about 20 years ago was an Eliezer Yudkowsky essay on AI saying that if we’re too dumb to know the meaning of life, we should build machines that are smart enough to work it out.

I've been defaulting to Bing over Google for non-programming queries for a while now. The results are objective and clearly devoid of whatever bias filter Google applies before returning what it thinks I'm asking for.

Bing with ChatGPT-4 already leaked so just a matter of time.

https://medium.com/@owenyin/scoop-oh-the-things-youll-do-wit...

Holy hell. If that is real then Google is FUUUCKED.

TBH, if Bing with ChatGPT can

a) understand what I'm trying to search for (e.g. when searching about specific errors like "windows taskbar bug showing empty windows in the taskbar for icons in the system tray"),

b) find the relevant information and answers, and

c) show links that I can go to to verify that information/answer

then I'd switch to Bing with ChatGPT for those types of search as Google has been getting steadily worse around this.

For the search above, Google shows results for blank/missing icons in the taskbar, etc. which are not the issue I'm trying to find information about. There are many other queries I've tried to get information from by a Google search, but haven't been able to make Google understand what I'm looking for -- instead, it tries to figure out what I mean, but ends up returning unrelated results.

I’d genuinely pay for this. It’s the first one that might be worth it. (For me at least)

I’ve been skeptical about the value of AI driven services despite the results, I’ve got DiffusionBee on my MacBook Pro with me everywhere, I use it from time to time and it’s surprisingly useful…

But the effort to train myself on prompt engineering in order to get the kinds of results that are worth me paying a monthly service for… sorry that’s where it falls apart. I’ve got shit to do and these things are meant to be “smart” and save time. I don’t really have time to learn an entirely undocumented domain specific language hidden inside the ML model. I got early access to GPT v3 and the other OpenAI models in their limited public beta periods… I’ve used my beta credits and all that… the thing is… I clearly don’t think/write/talk like other people other because universally my results have been fucking garbage until I sit down and think very hard what the computer might be expecting in order to get better results.

This continues to frustrate me as I’ve done tech support for a living for years earlier in my career, described technical computer related concepts and instructions to someone over the phone with no way to know what’s going on except asking them what they are seeing on their computer… and no I wasn’t just reading off a flow chart, about the only cheat sheet I needed was a list of useful keyboard shortcuts to get to things like system info, and some screenshots of windows desktops to make it easier to quickly describe visual points of reference for things to help guide the user I was helping… I did it so long I’ve been told I have a “tech support voice” when I mode switch into trying to genuinely help someone with a computer… and all these ML tools before ChatGPT where to use a colloquialism “as thick as two short planks” and dealing with them (prior to ChatGPT) was very frustrating. The ChatGPT is genuinely quite a lot better at understanding me and while it is prone to hallucinations and i continue to find the shallow pools of creativity where it absolutely loves to repeat itself (I once asked to generate a list of 50 name suggestions for specific kind of company and managed to get it to repeat itself twice) …

Point is I’d absolutely pay for this and probably halve the amount of google search (if not more since it’s hard to gauge a count of how much automatic almost reflex rephrases and re-searching I do on google due to poor results ) I use if I can pay for this to ensure good service quality. This is definitely worth $25AU a month if it doesn’t suck.

It clicked for me why you are getting poor results from GPT. You are in Australia and your dialect is subtly different in just the right way to throw off the model. You likely need a model fined tuned on Australian speech patterns.

If this announcement regards GPT+Bing, I hope MS is savvy enough to also use this as a rebranding moment for Bing.

"Bing: now with GPT!" doesn't roll of the tongue.

If this is truly an inflection point for Bing, give it a new branding. Leave Bing in the recycling bin.

Bing -> Bong

https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Bing_Bong

https://youtu.be/poz6W0znOfk

They could rebrand as Internet Explorer on the Edge. Sounds more like a search engine anyway.

In this case, it's the internet but without the "edge" (which is good in most business instances)

Dear god. This is a great idea. But obviously a terrible idea at the same time.

Just go with EdgeSearch. Then, instead of "googling something", we would be edging to get a result to a problem.

Keep it simple, just call it AskGPT

I’ve been thinking that AskMeAnything would be a good name for a ChatGPT-like service, but I guess they need a name that also works for the non-English-speaking world.

Interchat Explorer

It needs to be anthropomorphized. Maybe something like Jeeves.

Jeeves on Edge.

With a ridiculously strung out butler that hasn't slept in years, too much caffeine and the like, and a bit of an attitude.

Exactly. It will be a huge misstep if they don't take the opportunity to do a rebranding here.

It's not that Bing is terrible (well the name is, but that could be arguable). It's that after at all of these years Bing has become - deserving of it or not - synonymous with mediocre. When it comes to search, it's not even thought of as 'second best' - it's more like 'last resort' (or even "I'm feeling lucky")

I have a friend who uses it often for porn...

Bing, with a bang gives boom!

When you do a bang! search it processes it through chatGPT and boom! (there it is)

Chat Chat Go?

That would obviously be BinGo.

You won. Plain and simple.

Might confuse the elderly, but yes.

The joke is that "Bing" is an acronym:

But It's Not Google.

should have been: "Bing Is Not Google"

Following that pattern, Edge should have been called Zinc.

Clippy?

I vote for the name “Open”

BinGPT

You're welcome.

AskGPT. Although it would probably be good not to use GPT.

ChatGPT - GPT + Bing, contract to remove the B, ChatIng.

Not just branding, it's a category creation opportunity. What is past search. ChatGPT allows for a more fluid question, answer, discussion type experience than search.

It's such a particularly bad name. Just absolutely awful.

I genuinely think that there's some people that don't use it just because of the name, or at least are very resistant to it - and I say that because I am one of them.

Microsoft Azure Bing Intelligence Search Engine Services, Ultimate Signature Edition [1].

[1] https://kevinstreet.co.uk/2018/12/24/windows-vista-ultimate-...

(I added Ultimate Signature Edition, the rest was brought to you by ChatGPT.)

You're missing the Millenium XP Service Pack 4 somewhere in the name.

with VirusTotal Defender Protection DLC.

Why would MS add it to bing? MS does not control the web browser anymore, but they do control the windows default search box. Why would they enter in competition with google when they can steal people's attention to their own ecosystem? It would be more valuable for them to add it there, and integrate it with windows applications. Windows would become a super-app. Google can still curate the web, which is now just a training dataset

A lot of the jokes/suggestions here still include GPT which seems like the least brandable acronym in the world

It might be, but it’s already a brand because of chatgpt, so it shouldn’t matter that much

What brand it has is worth putting in the trash. Would be better to start over if they're going to actually push to a wider consumer market. The techies and early adopters will understand.

Clippy

They could call it Altered Vista.

This blog post claims it will be called “the new Bing”: https://medium.com/@owenyin/scoop-oh-the-things-youll-do-wit...

People seem to think that this integration will turn the tables on Google. But the fact is that Google has such a wide reach by default on browsers and devices, that this will likely not make a difference.

Google has a staggering 92% of searches globally[0]. Most people don’t know how to change their search engine. Bard can be a slow rollout, and if done right their search platform is not at risk.

[0] https://gs.statcounter.com/search-engine-market-share

People said same kind of things in the past, ie. about Nokia when iPhone came out etc.

I’ll admit anything is possible, but it’s highly unlikely.

It’s not like Google was caught completely unaware and incapable, they’ve been refining this tech for a while internally.

The big difference here is that you had too buy either the Nokia or the iPhone.

Google is preinstalled on billions of phones for free, and this will not be changing anytime soon.

How are you going to get millions of old folk that dont care about Bing vs Google to change the default search engine on their smartphone if you are Bing?

Dont microsfots pockets run deep enough to offer the same deal?

Until now it may have been futile..

Apple cares about experience just as much as money.

Their own search engine isn't that far off Bing and both are way behind Google.

Given Apple's stance on "privacy" I do not think this is fully true. If DuckDuckGo or another privacy focused vendor offered more cash than Google does, Apple would take it.

>> "Apple cares about experience just as much as money."

On the other hand, it's the perfect opportunity to put the 16 ML cores in my phone to work. Local Siri uses a generic model today, but I would use an Apple search engine if it could deliver genuinely personalized results instead of the SEO wasteland Google offers.

You do use an Apple search engine everyday if you use Safari.

It's what powers the Suggestions feature.

Except that this is not even remotely comparable.

ChatGPT on its own is not a replacement for Google Search and spending more than a few minutes with either makes it pretty obvious that it isn't.

Integration with Bing would get you part way there but still it simply hasn't got the rich database that Google has e.g. Map POIs, YouTube, Ad partner data sharing etc.

I know right? It doesn't even have a keyboard.

If it werent for google maps I'd probably happily switch to bing.

Sure. I don't use Google either and haven't for years. But most of the world is not us. We are a very small minority. Most people are using Google by default, and will continue to do so for many reasons, not least of which is that they are so entrenched. Every mobile device in the western world defaults to Google search...and changing it is not trivial for most people.

Indeed google controls all the entry points to the web

That's why MS should add the chat to windows

If it turns out to be Office + ChatGPT does it mean the return of Clippy?

Can Clippy auto-reply to my emails when I'm out with good answers based on replies I've already given and stuff I've documented on SharePoint that people never bother reading? That would be awesome.

Make him cool, give him shades and a vape, a broccoli haircut, call him Lil Clip, put him on TikTok (acquisition pending)

ROFL, Lil Clip it is. Also he is ace now and goes by Cle/Clim. We obviously had clim mis-gendered from the start. Why the hell did we need to force gender on a paperclip?

How do you do, fellow kids?

It looks like you’re trying to relate to teenagers. Would you like a slang glossary PowerPoint template?

the first AI rapper, and I use both terms loosely, was a massive failure and got cancelled recently.

It looks like you re slacking off. Do you want some help with that?

That is a ballsy move. Sounds like they're going to try and steal Google's thunder on the 9th. Wonder what they have planned - a version of chatgpt that isn't behind a login wall? Something that integrates with Bing? They probably have the compute infrastructure to pull it off.

Is the underdog move. If it fails, well, they are still far from the leader. But if it works...

Google already announced there AI today though, so looks like they are trying to one up each other.

Making ChatGPT part of Office 365, along with Bing integration, would be a baller move. In one move Google would be on the defensive for search, productivity and email.

Along with the ChatGTP enhanced search that is most likely to be announced soon, I've just (10 minutes before posting this) spotted https://www.bing.com/images/create which is AI image generation powered by DALL-E

going to do the same mistakes again and again, this service is not available in my region, and bing still censoring search in my country, stating local law that is not there, they are confusing Morocco with a middle east country.

Microsoft magnificently coordinates a move once done by Facebook who also stole Snap Inc's thunder before announcing their conference years ago and applies that same move on to Google to finish them off.

This announcement is hyping around ChatGPT on Bing, GPT-4, and potentially generative videos from images which is already around the corner. Google has the same set of this research and I expect this to be applied on to Google Search. But rather than to join the chorus of calls for the end of Google in two years because of ChatGPT, it is better to wait for what research Google has done before all of this, since right now, ChatGPT's capability is no better than a clever sophist unable to transparently explain itself.

It is not over for Google. They are fine. It is only over for both OpenAI and Google when an open source LLM that is better and smaller than ChatGPT is released; just like what Stable Diffusion did to DALL-E 2.

That is the real requirement that will change everything permanently.

> It is only over for both OpenAI and Google when an open source LLM that is better and smaller than ChatGPT is released; just like what Stable Diffusion did to DALL-E 2.

Man imagine a text model running local on your device. Plus it doesn't even need to be as good as the state of the art stuff - just "good enough" for the average person to care.

Stable diffusion already runs on iPhones (I'm sure android too) albeit slowly - I don't think its unrealistic. Stable diffusion's model is only ~2.4gb pruned. Sure we aren't quite there yet but I think it's totally possible.

YES. This is great news. It's really time to shake up the competition and kicks things back into high gear.

I need a Google Home type of device with ChatGPT level of AI. I which Microsoft would do this.

Oh my god imagine a home assistant that could keep track of two kitchen timers simultaneously. Truly we live in the future.

Cortana goes to college

Blood in the water since Google themselves said ChatGPT could kill them in a few years.

I suppose it's Bing -> "SearchGPT" or maybe GPT integration for office or both. Let's see how much hybe will be generated. Current stock price: 256.77

round two, fight

I wonder how they plan to monetize this, and what the compute costs look like.

That is the exact thing that the company playing catch-up can worry about later once the users show up. MS has plenty of money and not much to protect in the search space. It’s Google that’s facing an existential risk if this new information tool becomes popular and they can’t figure out how to monetize it.

ChatGPT integrated knowledge graph and instant answers in bing.

Verifiable answers? Or just ChatGPT answers with some random facts?

I could be wrong but first one is not yet implented and second one doesn't make sense.

I think it's going to be about the new version of clippy.

If it is true Microsoft has money in the war chest they should be looking at ideas twice the size of Twitter in value, $88B. OpenAi is Elon M's left behind project and it doesn't give the impression it has made rapid progress like the demos at Neuralink. Imagine the synergy from Twitter, Neuralink, Tesla for tackling large language models. Twitter has the SoT for how people interact. I dunno where OpenAi gets data and how fresh it is.

Does one really want to train ChatGPT using Twitter?

Oh, boy.

What does this mean for the 'Cortana' uhh... feature?

Announcements of announcements are historically considered offtopic on HN. Let's at least wait until there's some kind of details to discuss.

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