AI Search Engines Can Now Chat With Us, but Glitches Abound

Nearly a quarter-century after Google's search engine began to reshape how we use the internet, big tech companies are racing to revamp a familiar web tool into a gateway to a new form of artificial intelligence.

If it seems like this week's newly announced Al search chatbots - Google's Bard, Baidu's Ernie Bot and Microsoft's Bing chatbot - are coming out of nowhere, well, even some of their makers seem to think so. The spark rushing them to market was the popularity of ChatGPT, launched late last year by Microsoft's partner OpenAl and now helping to power a new version of the Bing search engine.

First out of the gate among big tech companies with a publicly accessible search chatbot, Microsoft executives said this week they had been hard at work on the project since last summer. But the excitement around ChatGPT brought new urgency.

"The reception to ChatGPT and how that took off, that was certainly a surprise," said Yusuf Medhi, the executive leading Microsoft's consumer division, in an interview. "How rapidly it went mainstream, where everybody's talking about it, like, in every meeting. That did surprise me."

HOW'S THIS DIFFERENT FROM CHATGPT?

Millions of people have now tried ChatGPT, using it to write silly poems and songs, compose letters, recipes and marketing campaigns or help write schoolwork. Trained on a huge trove of online writings, from instruction manuals to digitized books, it has a strong command of human language and grammar. But what the newest crop of search chatbots promise that ChatGPT doesn't have is the immediacy of what can be found in a web search. Ask the preview version of the new Bing for the latest news - or just what people are talking about on Twitter and it summarizes a selection of the day's top stories or trends, with footnotes linking to media outlets or other data sources.

ARE THEY ACCURATE?