• Microsoft is set to host an in-person news event today.
• It’s expected that Microsoft will showcase OpenAI’s integration with Microsoft products.
• The news announcement comes minutes after Google announced Bard, it’s response to ChatGPT.

After laying off 11 000 employees in January, Microsoft announced a $10 billion investment into OpenAI. Now, according to a report from The Verge, Microsoft is set to announce OpenAI’s ChatGPT integration with Bing.

The integration is something we reported on earlier this month. With the power of a faster version of ChatGPT, namely ChatGPT-4, Microsoft would be able to compete with Google as regards speed and feature set as compared to Google.

Back to the announcement happening today, Microsoft will host a news event at 20:00 SAST in which it will reportedly see chief executive officer Satya Nadella share progress “on a few exciting projects”.

We hope that one of those projects is Microsoft Designer which was announced in 2022. This application features OpenAI’s DALL-E 2 which allows users to generate images using text prompts. Further to this, Microsoft said in October that the generative image AI would be incorporated into Bing in the Image Creator. This would allow you to essentially cook up an image if you couldn’t find what you were searching for.

As The Verge highlights, Microsoft made a song and dance of this event just moments after Google announced its answer to ChatGPT, Bard. Google is also expected to host an event today showcasing a variety of product updates.

Bard is powered by Google’s own Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) platform.

“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses. Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity, helping you to explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills,” Google and Alphabet chief executive officer, Sundar Pichai wrote in a blog post.

Bard isn’t being released to the wider public as of yet and Google is being careful to ensure the platform meets a “high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information”.

Microsoft’s moves to integrate ChatGPT-4 into Bing is a sign that the firm isn’t content with being the meme of search engines anymore. Whether users will actually use Bing is unclear but, the allure of ChatGPT has proven to be too much to resist.

Unfortunately, Microsoft’s news event won’t be livestreamed so we’re going to have to wait for folks on the ground in Redmond to update us about what goes down.