Microsoft is responding to Google Bard with a surprise event, and ChatGPT may be on the list

Microsoft has announced an event for February 7th where the company will share details on “progress on some exciting projects.” The event, first reported by The Verge, will likely be about ChatGPT-related advances and how they will be an integral part of Microsoft products like Bing Search and the Office suite in the near future.

Interestingly, Microsoft’s event news comes just minutes after Google announced Bard, the search giant’s own version of ChatGPT. Bard will be rolling out publicly in the coming weeks, although a small group of testers will have access to the technology starting today. Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai classifies Bard as an “experimental conversational AI service” based on its neural language model “LaMDA” (Language Model for Dialogue Applications).

However, it seems Microsoft isn’t too far off offering ChatGPT’s smarts baked into its own products. Just a few days ago, an early test build of Bing search with ChatGPT functionality was discovered after Microsoft announced that the conversational AI will soon be writing emails for you in Outlook, among other things.

Just in case there was any doubt about tomorrow’s Microsoft event highlighting ChatGPT and related AI advances, OpenAI picked it up on Twitter. OpenAI boss Sam Altman just tweeted a selfie of himself and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Altman’s tweet mentions that he’s in Redmond, the location of Microsoft’s headquarters, and adds that he’s “excited about tomorrow’s event.”

hello from redmond! looking forward to tomorrow’s event pic.twitter.com/b7TUr0ti42

— Sam Altman (@sama) February 6, 2023

Now ChatGPT is no stranger to working with Microsoft. The software and cloud services giant recently announced it will be putting around $10 billion into the AI ​​startup, a deal that will bring OpenAI operations to Microsoft’s Azure cloud containers and Microsoft at the same time Granted access to key ChatGPT APIs. For the uninitiated, APIs are the secret code sauce that will allow Microsoft to integrate ChatGPT capabilities into its widely used software products like Word and PowerPoint. Earlier this month, President Brad Stone announced that “a small group of senior executives and senior AI experts” at the company had begun experimenting with the early build of ChatGPT as early as last summer (via Microsoft).

Microsoft will not be alone in the race for next-gen AI dominance. The immense popularity of ChatGPT sparked an innovation panic at Google, according to a New York Times report. Things got so desperate that founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin reportedly held a couple of high-level meetings to discuss plans to integrate AI capabilities into the company’s own consumer-facing products, including bread-and-butter moneymaker Google Search.