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.

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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?