Is This The Week AI Changed Everything?
Welcome to the week of AI one-upmanship. On Tuesday, in a surprise announcement, Microsoft unveiled its plans to bring the technology behind OpenAI’s ChatGPT bot to its search engine, Bing. (Remember Bing? Because Bing remembers your jokes.) According to the company, the new tool will be a paradigm shift in the way that humans search the internet. As one early tester demonstrated, the query Find me tickets to a Beyoncé concert in the United States where I won’t need a jacket at night prompts the AI to estimate what constitutes jacket weather, gather tour dates, and then cross-reference those dates with the average temperature in the locations during the time of the show, all to provide a few-sentence answer. In one example from Microsoft’s presentation, Bing helped a user come up with a travel itinerary and then write messages proposing the trip to family members. Clippy, it appears, has touched the face of God.
On its own, all of that would be
