Microsoft’s turn to the dark side could end up costing its AI ambitions dearly.
When Microsoft incorporated ChatGPT’s chatbot into Bing, it managed to achieve something the company had been trying to do for years: it got people excited about its unloved search engine. However, if it’s not careful, its eagerness to capitalize on this rare Bing win could end up doing more harm than good.
As Bloomberg reports (opens in new tab), Microsoft has threatened search engines that use Bing indexing that it will revoke licences if they use Bing data in their own AI chatbots.
Indexing the entire internet so that it can be searched is a very expensive endeavour, which is why smaller search engines such as DuckDuckGo pay the companies behind bigger search engines, such as Bing and Google, to use their indexing for their own products.
It seems while Microsoft is perfectly happy to make money from licencing Bing’s indexing for search engines, it doesn’t want it being used in any rival chatbots. According to Bloomberg, Microsoft has warned at least two of its customers that using Bing’s index for their own AI chat tools violates the terms of their contract, which could result in them losing access to the index altogether.
