Microsoft is moving fast with its planned integration of OpenAI ChatGPT, an AI-generated chatbot capable of answering a wide range of questions. The company has invested heavily in OpenAI, plans to incorporate ChatGPT features into Office applications and in the service Azure OpenAI. And now, according to a new report from Semafor, a new version of ChatGPT, ChatGPT-4, could be coming to Bing. “In the next weeks.”
ChatGPT-4 is a faster variant of ChatGPT-3, which can take minutes to come up with a response. Semafor explains that Microsoft is using a supercomputer it announced in May 2020 to power ChatGPT, with some pretty impressive specs:
The supercomputer that Microsoft and OpenAI built had 285,000 CPU cores and 10,000 GPUs, each with 400 gigabits per second of network connectivity.
ChatGPT-4 an incredible boost for Bing
The rush to capitalize on the generative AI craze that OpenAI and Microsoft kicked off has made it difficult for some companies to get their hands on Nvidia’s latest graphics processor, the H100 Tensor Core GPUspecifically designed to run “transformers” like those used in GPT. (I found one for sale on the Internet for $30,000.)
This shows how important server-side innovations will be to bring AI products to market. A big part of improving OpenAI will be figuring out how to run it faster and more cost-effectively. It’s unclear how ChatGPT will be incorporated into Bing, but Semafor and others hope it will challenge Google’s dominance in search:
The planned addition of ChatGPT to Microsoft products will likely unleash a new competition in Internet search: something that hasn’t happened since Google supplanted Yahoo as the most popular search engine.
Microsoft and OpenAI are wasting no time in the race to bring AI into the computing landscape. OpenAI didn’t release ChatGPT until November 2022, just a few months ago, according to Wikipedia. But the chatbot itself, armed with some supercomputer powers, is also a fast learner. Whether the chatbot will actually disrupt searches remains to be seen, and what that means for Google. Not to mention search-reliant businesses like SEO organizations, but significant changes could be coming, and soon.