Microsoft Wants to Integrate OpenAI’s ChatGPT into Bing and Office Apps

Microsoft is reportedly working on integrating some of OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI-powered functions into its Office apps, which include Word, Outlook and PowerPoint, as well as its search engine Bing. The company has already started testing of the text generating GPT model from OpenAI on Word to enhance its autocomplete feature.

For Outlook, Microsoft is also making use of OpenAI technology to improve search results without requiring the input of specific keywords. The aim is for it to soon to be able to even help suggest entire email replies and recommend necessary changes.

For its search engine called Bing, which has historically struggled to compete with the Google, Microsoft is also working on a new OpenAI enhanced version which is expected to be launched before the end of March 2023. The new vision, which makes use of OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology, will be able to provide more humanlike answers to queries from users, instead of simply links to pages which may potentially have the information the user is looking for. It is also said that Microsoft would like to use this ability as a base to make Bing more competitive against and even challenge Google’s already powerful Knowledge Graph technology to offer better answers to users.

As part of this deal to integrate OpenAI technology into Microsoft’s core programs, it has also been reported that Microsoft plans to invest around USD 10 bln into OpenAI. If this proves to be correct true, that will take Microsoft’s ownership of OpenAI to 49%. Other investors and OpenAI will hold the remaining 49% and 2% stake of the company respectively. That deal would also include a clause that allows Microsoft to receive 75 % of OpenAI profit until it fully recoups the money invested. This news broke in The Verge.