Technologies

Remember Bing? With ChatGPT’s Help, Microsoft Is Coming for Google Search

The future of search is conversational, if ChatGPT’s viral success is anything to go by.

Have you ever found yourself trawling through endless pages of results on a search engine to find the answer to a complex question? Say you want to find out if a vegetarian diet is suitable for your dog. Your research journey might begin by hopping onto Google and typing «is a veg diet good for dogs» into the search box and then having to make sense of the legion of generated links. By the time you find an answer, you’ve sunk way more time than you’d budgeted into poring through articles, reports and their sources.

In the not-so-distant future, finding the answer to a complex question might not be such a tedious process. Microsoft is reportedly integrating a more advanced version (GPT-4) of the AI tech that underlies the headline-grabbing ChatGPT into its Bing search engine in a move that could transform search as we know it. More specifically, Bing might have the potential to serve up a search experience that’s superior to Google, according to AI researchers, and potentially usurp the search giant’s decades-long dominance.

«ChatGPT is the first new technology in more than a decade that may really transform search and that could, at least in principle, upend Google’s market dominance,» said Anton Korinek, an AI researcher and professor of economics, at the University of Virginia. «What the technology does is that it allows consumers to interact with their computer in a much more natural and conversational form than traditional search.»

At this point, we don’t know what Bing’s AI-driven search results might look like exactly (although some people have seen the new version of Bing appear briefly before vanishing). Microsoft declined to comment for this story. However, AI researchers expect a meaningful departure from the status quo in terms of how a search engine presents an answer and how users interact with it. After all, ChatGPT is not designed to browse the internet for information (like a search engine). Instead, the chatbot uses information studied from vast swaths of training data to generate a response.

«ChatGPT can answer its users with a single clear response compared to the myriads of links of traditional search engines. It also has capabilities that are far beyond traditional search engines, like [the ability] to generate new text, explain concepts, have a back-and-forth conversation between the user and the system, and so on,» said Korinek. «People still find emergent capabilities that even the creators of ChatGPT were not aware that the system had.»

Microsoft announced plans in January to invest more resources into OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, to the tune of $10 billion. The deal would help keep both companies at the cutting edge of what’s known as generative AI, a tech used in ChatGPT that can learn from copious amounts of data to create virtually any content format (text, images, music and so on) simply from a text prompt.

Search is just one in a suite of consumer-facing products in Microsoft’s stable that could potentially change meaningfully for customers in the coming years. According to a report by The Information, the Seattle-based tech giant also has plans to integrate ChatGPT’s AI tech into long-established products like Word, PowerPoint and Outlook in an endeavor that could change how more than a billion people work and accomplish daily tasks. For instance, integrating it into Outlook could mean simply prompting the email application to write a message about a specific topic.

«Microsoft will deploy OpenAI’s models across our consumer and enterprise products and introduce new categories of digital experiences built on OpenAI’s technology,» the company said in a press release announcing the expanded partnership.

Conversational search

For its part, Google and its cutting-edge subunit DeepMind have been working on similar systems for years. In fact, Google pioneered the AI technology known as a transformer that’s used in ChatGPT, GPT-3 and GPT-2. The search giant chose not to release them to the public, though, in part over concerns about unethical behavior and how chat systems sometimes break social norms.

However, in the wake of ChatGPT’s viral success, Google says it’s gearing up to release its challenger to ChatGPT imminently.

«In the coming weeks and months, we’ll make these language models available, starting with LaMDA, so that people can engage directly with them,» CEO Sundar Pichai said on a call detailing Alphabet’s fourth-quarter financial results in early February.

Google will focus on responsible AI, Pichai said, an important point given the problems with bias and wrong answers the technology can produce, among others. For instance, in 2016 Microsoft created a chatbot called Tay that it was forced to take offline after it spewed out hate speech. Even ChatGPT, which has rules to create positive and friendly content, can be manipulated into producing upsetting responses using the right prompts.

Google has also recently invested $300 million dollars into ChatGPT rival Anthropic, according to a Financial Times report.

«A competing system that is currently conducting beta tests is Anthropic’s Claude, which (or perhaps I should say who) has a very different personality from ChatGPT and is really a pleasure to interact with —it is so refined, cultured and polite,» said Korinek.

It’s no secret that Google search has become more conversational in general over the years. The company has made progress in this area with the Google assistant and with knowledge panels in search, and for years has pitched conversation as the future of search, demoing its AI systems LaMDA and MUM at its 2021 I/O developer conference.

Leveraging OpenAI’s artificial intelligence seems to be how Microsoft is attempting to edge out Google at its own game. In the wake of ChatGPT’s release, Google management issued a «code red,» according to The New York Times. The report said internal teams had been reassigned to kickstart work on AI between now and an expected company conference in May.

Still, Google’s search engine today remains the undisputed market leader as it has for decades, commanding 84% of global search market share, compared to Bing’s 9% (although it has grown in recent years) in 2022, according to Statista.

Google declined to comment for this story.

How smart is ChatGPT?

As you’ve probably heard by now, ChatGPT is a sophisticated chatbot that went viral globally after its consumer release in late November as a free online tool accessible to anyone with an internet connection. The AI-powered chatbot made headlines thanks in part to its ability to churn out delightful poetry, generate meal plans and provide authoritative answers to complex questions within seconds after being prompted. The tech underlying it isn’t exactly brand new, but no chatbot had yet managed to capture mainstream fascination in the way that ChatGPT did. That’s largely because OpenAI built a snazzy user experience around the GPT-3.5 language model, and that’s the phenomenon we know as ChatGPT.

GPT-3.5 is an improved version of GPT-3, which debuted in 2020 and which learned from vast tracts of data and code to help it achieve its abilities. According to researchers at Stanford University, GPT-3 was trained on 570 gigabytes of text and has 175 billion parameters. (Google’s Dale Markowitz, meanwhile, put it at 45 terabytes of text data, «including almost all of the public web.») For comparison, its predecessor, GPT-2, was over 100 times smaller, at 1.5 billion parameters.

«This increase in scale drastically changes the behavior of the model — GPT-3 is able to perform tasks it was not explicitly trained on, like translating sentences from English to French, with few to no training examples. This behavior was mostly absent in GPT-2,» researchers from Stanford‘s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence wrote in a 2021 post.

«The current version of ChatGPT probably already knows more about the world than any individual human, and it can present that knowledge in digestible form,» said Korinek.

For all the promise ChatGPT holds, there are nearly as many limitations. Critics of ChatGPT say it’s not always clear where the chatbot is pulling information from, which can make it difficult for people to trust the results. Skeptics also point out that ChatGPT will always remain undermined by the imperfect nature of the data it was trained on, including biased information or misinformation.

OpenAI has acknowledged the chatbot’s weaknesses in its current form. CEO Sam Altman said in a December post on Twitter that the product struggles with «robustness and truthfulness» and that it would be «a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now.»

But don’t look for the AI bandwagon to slow down.

«There will be a number of new systems like ChatGPT that will enter the market in 2023, and the main implication of the resulting competition is that consumers will have more choice and, hopefully, better products for consumers,» added Korinek.

GPT-4, which is under development, is reported to have 100 trillion parameters. But a release is not expected to take place until OpenAI is «confident we can [release] it safely and responsibly,» Altman said in an interview with StrictlyVC in early January.

Altman also attempted to manage expectations of that fourth iteration of GPT, the sophisticated language model that underpins ChatGPT, saying «we don’t have AGI.» AGI stands for artificial general intelligence, or a technology with its own emergent intelligence as opposed to relying on the deep learning models currently used by OpenAI. It’s the kind of intelligence that has been dramatized in science fiction stories for more than a century and was popularized in recent years by the award-winning dystopian show Westworld.

«I think [AGI] is sort of what is expected of us,» Altman said in the same interview, adding that GPT-4 is «going to disappoint» people who hold out that hope.

Editors’ note: CNET is using an AI engine to create some personal finance explainers that are edited and fact-checked by our editors. For more, see this post.

Technologies

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword Answers for Friday, May 16

Here are the answers for The New York Times Mini Crossword for May 16.

Looking for the most recent Mini Crossword answer? Click here for today’s Mini Crossword hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Wordle, Strands, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s NYT Mini Crossword took me longer than usual. 1-Down is tough — hint, there’s an old-fashioned bottled beverage with the same name. Need some help with today’s Mini Crossword? Read on. And if you could use some hints and guidance for daily solving, check out our Mini Crossword tips.

The Mini Crossword is just one of many games in the Times’ games collection. If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: Tips and Tricks for Solving The New York Times Mini Crossword

Let’s get at those Mini Crossword clues and answers.

Mini across clues and answers

1A clue: Unit of distance that can precede «stone» and «age»
Answer: MILE

5A clue: Kind of powder used for hot chocolate
Answer: COCOA

6A clue: On the button
Answer: EXACT

7A clue: Connections
Answer: LINKS

8A clue: «___ not and say we did!»
Answer: LETS

Mini down clues and answers

1D clue: Gutsy determination
Answer: MOXIE

2D clue: «That’s not gonna work for me»
Answer: ICANT

3D clue: Strands
Answer: LOCKS

4D clue: Has a bite
Answer: EATS

5D clue: Spreadsheet unit
Answer: CELL

How to play more Mini Crosswords

The New York Times Games section offers a large number of online games, but only some of them are free for all to play. You can play the current day’s Mini Crossword for free, but you’ll need a subscription to the Times Games section to play older puzzles from the archives.

Technologies

Congress Might Halt State AI Regulations. What It Means for You and Your Privacy

House Republicans are proposing a 10-year moratorium on the enforcement of state rules around artificial intelligence.

States will not be able to enforce their regulations on artificial intelligence technology for a decade under a plan being considered in the US House of Representatives. The legislation, in an amendment accepted this week by the House Energy and Commerce Committee, says no state or political subdivision «may enforce any law or regulation regulating artificial intelligence models, artificial intelligence systems or automated decision systems» for 10 years. The proposal would still need the approval of both chambers of Congress and President Donald Trump before it can become law.

AI developers and some lawmakers have said federal action is necessary to keep states from creating a patchwork of different rules and regulations across the US that could slow the technology’s growth. The rapid growth in generative AI since ChatGPT exploded on the scene in late 2022 has led companies to fit the technology in as many spaces as possible. The economic implications are significant, as the US and China race to see which country’s tech will predominate, but generative AI poses privacy, transparency and other risks for consumers that lawmakers have sought to temper.

«We need, as an industry and as a country, one clear federal standard, whatever it may be,» Alexandr Wang, founder and CEO of the data company Scale AI, told lawmakers during an April hearing. «But we need one, we need clarity as to one federal standard and have preemption to prevent this outcome where you have 50 different standards.»

Efforts to limit the ability of states to regulate artificial intelligence could mean fewer consumer protections around a technology that is increasingly seeping into every aspect of American life. «There have been a lot of discussions at the state level, and I would think that it’s important for us to approach this problem at multiple levels,» said Anjana Susarla, a professor at Michigan State University who studies AI. «We could approach it at the national level. We can approach it at the state level too. I think we need both.»

Several states have already started regulating AI

The proposed language would bar states from enforcing any regulation, including those already on the books. The exceptions are rules and laws that make things easier for AI development and those that apply the same standards to non-AI models and systems that do similar things. These kinds of regulations are already starting to pop up. The biggest focus is not in the US, but in Europe, where the European Union has already implemented standards for AI. But states are starting to get in on the action.

Colorado passed a set of consumer protections last year, set to go into effect in 2026. California adopted more than a dozen AI-related laws last year. Other states have laws and regulations that often deal with specific issues such as deepfakes or require AI developers to publish information about their training data. At the local level, some regulations also address potential employment discrimination if AI systems are used in hiring.

«States are all over the map when it comes to what they want to regulate in AI,» said Arsen Kourinian, partner at the law firm Mayer Brown. So far in 2025, state lawmakers have introduced at least 550 proposals around AI, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In the House committee hearing last month, Rep. Jay Obernolte, a Republican from California, signaled a desire to get ahead of more state-level regulation. «We have a limited amount of legislative runway to be able to get that problem solved before the states get too far ahead,» he said.

While some states have laws on the books, not all of them have gone into effect or seen any enforcement. That limits the potential short-term impact of a moratorium, said Cobun Zweifel-Keegan, managing director in Washington for the International Association of Privacy Professionals. «There isn’t really any enforcement yet.»

A moratorium would likely deter state legislators and policymakers from developing and proposing new regulations, Zweifel-Keegan said. «The federal government would become the primary and potentially sole regulator around AI systems,» he said.

What a moratorium on state AI regulation means

AI developers have asked for any guardrails placed on their work to be consistent and streamlined. During a Senate Commerce Committee hearing last week, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told Sen. Ted Cruz, a Republican from Texas, that an EU-style regulatory system «would be disastrous» for the industry. Altman suggested instead that the industry develop its own standards.

Asked by Sen. Brian Schatz, a Democrat from Hawaii, if industry self-regulation is enough at the moment, Altman said he thought some guardrails would be good but, «It’s easy for it to go too far. As I have learned more about how the world works, I am more afraid that it could go too far and have really bad consequences.» (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, parent company of CNET, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.)

Concerns from companies — both the developers that create AI systems and the «deployers» who use them in interactions with consumers — often stem from fears that states will mandate significant work such as impact assessments or transparency notices before a product is released, Kourinian said. Consumer advocates have said more regulations are needed, and hampering the ability of states could hurt the privacy and safety of users.

«AI is being used widely to make decisions about people’s lives without transparency, accountability or recourse — it’s also facilitating chilling fraud, impersonation and surveillance,» Ben Winters, director of AI and privacy at the Consumer Federation of America, said in a statement. «A 10-year pause would lead to more discrimination, more deception and less control — simply put, it’s siding with tech companies over the people they impact.»

A moratorium on specific state rules and laws could result in more consumer protection issues being dealt with in court or by state attorneys general, Kourinian said. Existing laws around unfair and deceptive practices that are not specific to AI would still apply. «Time will tell how judges will interpret those issues,» he said.

Susarla said the pervasiveness of AI across industries means states might be able to regulate issues like privacy and transparency more broadly, without focusing on the technology. But a moratorium on AI regulation could lead to such policies being tied up in lawsuits. «It has to be some kind of balance between ‘we don’t want to stop innovation,’ but on the other hand, we also need to recognize that there can be real consequences,» she said.

Much policy around the governance of AI systems does happen because of those so-called technology-agnostic rules and laws, Zweifel-Keegan said. «It’s worth also remembering that there are a lot of existing laws and there is a potential to make new laws that don’t trigger the moratorium but do apply to AI systems as long as they apply to other systems,» he said.

Technologies

Garmin Announces the Forerunner 570 and 970 Running Smartwatches

The sleek new smartwatches, aimed at athletes, will ship with the company’s brightest screens yet.

Serious runners looking to upgrade their smartwatch now have two new Garmin Forerunner options in the form of the 570 and 970. For those unfamiliar, Forerunner is Garmin’s line of running and triathlon training watches. The new versions pack the brightest display from Garmin to date and add new training tools, recovery insights and connected features.

Garmin is competing in a field that includes the Apple Watch and Apple Watch Ultra, which is Apple’s adventure-focused version of its regular smartwatch. Garmin is perhaps best known for its in-car GPS systems, but has branched out into smartwatches aimed at athletes over the past few years.

Want to learn more? Check out our roundup of the best Garmin deals around. If you’re a die-hard Apple fan, we also have a recent roundup of Apple watch rumors for you to peruse.

New Forerunners feature a variety of colors

570 is the cheaper of the two

The 570 is available in both 42mm and 47mm cases, and each size has two exclusive color options in addition to the slate gray, aluminum and black band colors. The 970 only ships in a 47mm case, meaning you can only go big or go back to the 570.

The 970 is available in three colors that look good, but are slightly less fun than its smaller sibling’s options. This model is for the serious athlete or those who just want the best Garmin has to offer.

A brighter 1.4-inch AMOLED display, with an optional always-on mode is new for both watches. Opting for this setting will likely reduce battery life, but given that the 570 has an 11-day battery life, and the 970 can squeak out 15 days you probably won’t be reaching for a charger nearly as much as you would with other smartwatches.

Both watches feature the Garmin Triathlon Coach trainer, which offers adaptive daily personalized workouts plans based on your performance and health metrics. Users can also create multisport workouts from the Garmin Connect app and send them to the watch to track stats even when you switch to another sport during training.

970 extras include flashlight and titanium bezel

The Forerunner 970 includes a set of expected exclusive features, including a scratch-resistant sapphire lens and titanium bezel.

The 970 also ships with a built-in LED flashlight and offers on-screen controls to dial down the brightness. Additional features include running tolerance, step-speed loss and support for ECG measurements in the app, though this feature’s availability will vary by region.

Pricing and availability

Both the Forerunner 570 and 970 will be available to order starting May 21. The Forerunner 570 42mm and the Forerunner 570 47mm are priced at $550, while the Forerunner 970 costs $750.