Microsoft rushed Bing AI co-pilot despite warnings from OpenAI: Report

American tech major Microsoft reportedly rushed GPT-4 integration into Bing search engine despite OpenAI warnings about the inconsistencies in the language model.

According to a news report in the Wall Street Journal, OpenAI warned Microsoft of the risks involved in rolling out a chatbot-based feature in the latter’s search engine based on its unreleased version of GPT-4.
Microsoft announced the Bing AI Copilot in February this year. The initial release of the company’s generative AI-powered search engine was marred with inaccuracies, including biased responses and incorrect information. In damage control mode, Microsoft limited Bing Chat responses.

The news report in the Wall Street Journal also alleges tensions between the two companies with regard to features developed based on AI. According to the report, OpenAI gave Microsoft a few weeks’ notice ahead of starting ChatGPT public testing. Microsoft was beginning to integrate OpenAI’s models into Bing at that point in time. Microsoft employees were worried that ChatGPT would steal the new Bing’s thunder. Some also argued that Bing could benefit from the lessons learned from how the public used ChatGPT.

Microsoft has invested billions in OpenAI to get early access to its generative AI technology. It hosts OpenAI’s technology on its Azure cloud services and sells access to technology by integrating it into its own services such as Bing AI Copilot.

The new Bing is yet to come close to the breakout success of ChatGPT.

ChatGPT has already reached 200 million monthly users, according to analytics firm YipitData, making it one of the fastest-growing consumer apps in history.