Microsoft has had a major effect on OpenAI, investing billions into the org and helping to develop AI such as ChatGPT and GPT-4. But perhaps Microsoft's biggest influence has been to turn the not-for-profit OpenAI into a money printing machine. While capitalists can celebrate, it also means Microsoft is looking to monetize its new Bing Chat, which uses OpenAI's GPT-4 engine.
Specifically, Microsoft says that it is going to use ads to generate revenue within the chatbot. In an official blog post, Microsoft says with Bing Chat it wants to “drive more traffic to publishers in this new world of search”.
In the post, Yusuf Mehdi, the company's Corporate Vice President & Consumer Chief Marketing Officer, says:
“The early progress is encouraging. Based on our data from the preview, we are driving more traffic from all types of users. We have brought more people to Bing/Edge for new scenarios like chat and we are seeing increased usage. Then, we have uniquely implemented ways to drive traffic to publishers including citations within the body of the chat answers that are linked to sources as well as citations below the chat results to “learn more” with links to additional sources.”
Over the last few weeks, Microsoft has been increasing the quality of Bing Chat. As the company becomes more confident with the performance of the GPT-4 search AI chatbot, it has been increasing the number of turn limits available.
It has been around six weeks since Microsoft launched Bing Chat, its new AI search engine powered by OpenAI's ChatGPT. Since then, the AI went through a shaky start but through several updates has improved a lot. With the new GPT-4 AI engine now powering Bing Chat, Microsoft is confident of the quality of the search tool.
Improving Bing Chat in Microsoft Start
In the blog post, Mehdi says Microsoft has met with partners that want to integrate the Microsoft Start news feed, which will be powered by Bing Chat. The company has received feedback from those partners including:
The post states that the company has met with some of the businesses that are partners in the Microsoft Start news feed service. Those partners provided feedback to Microsoft on how they could use Bing Chat to link to their content and services. Microsoft added a couple of early ideas:
- “An expanded hover experience where hovering over a link from a publisher will display more links from that publisher giving the user more ways to engage and driving more traffic to the publisher's website.
- For our Microsoft Start partners, placing a rich caption of Microsoft Start licensed content beside the chat answer helping to drive more user engagement with the content on Microsoft Start where we share the ad revenue with the partner. We're also exploring placing ads in the chat experience to share the ad revenue with partners whose content contributed to the chat response.”
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