In a renewed effort to challenge search giant Google, Microsoft is planning to integrate the AI engine behind the popular ChatGPT3 chatbot from OpenAI into its Bing search engine, according to reports from The Information and Bloomberg.

Microsoft is betting on the rising popularity of ChatGPT3, as it showcases a new way to search the internet and responding to queries using conversational language - different from what Google offers currently in the way of links, Bloomberg cited a company source as saying.  

Google commands more than 91% market share in the internet search category globally, compared to Bing's 2.95% as of November 2022, according to data from similarweb.com.

The source cited by Bloomberg also said that Microsoft was evaluating the accuracy of the ChatGPT3 AI engine and was working on understanding how soon it could be integrated with Bing, but warned that it could take several months before the chatbot engine is integrated into Bing and is released to the public.

The Information report claims that Bing's March 2023 release could include the chatbot engine integration going live.  

An email sent to Microsoft and OpenAI didn't immediately elicit a response.

The addition of the new AI engine would not be Microsoft's first effort to integrate of an OpenAI tool with Bing.

In October 2022, Microsoft in a blog post said that it was looking to integrate the image generation software engine, DALL-E 2, into the image creator inside Bing.

Both the planned integrations can be traced back to Microsoft's$1 billion investment in OpenAI in 2019 to expedite efforts to further artificial general intelligence for "widely distributed economic benefits."

Artificial general intelligence is a term applied to AI systems that can learn to perform any intellectual task a person can, and communicate in natural language the way a person can, as opposed to systems that are trained to do specific tasks.

"We're partnering to develop a hardware and software platform within Microsoft Azure which will scale to AGI (artificial general intelligence). We'll jointly develop new Azure AI supercomputing technologies," according to a joint statement.  

In addition to integrating new AI features into Bing, Microsoft's renewed efforts to grab market share from Google, especially on the mobile side, include plans for a new super app for mobile phones  that will combine shopping, messaging, web search, and newsfeeds, according to a separate report from The Information.