Microsoft’s surprise press event is looking like a Bing announcement with ChatGPT as the main guest

In a seesaw battle of headlines, Microsoft followed Google’s surprise blog announcement of the company’s new conversational AI platform Bard, with its own surprise announcement of a press event happening at its Redmond campus in Washington.

The timing could be purely coincidental, but the subject matter of each announcement may not be, with Microsoft rumored to go into further detail about its partnership with OpenAI and the integration of its transformer technology into items such as Bing Search.

The event starts at 10AM PT/ 1PM ET on February 7, 2023, and while Microsoft hasn’t officially stated what the event is for, its speculative that it will include conversations regarding ChatGPT as the invites that went out last week to a select few in the press, include a message from company CEO Satya Nadella explaining that they intend to “share some progress on a few exciting projects.”

Microsoft’s new surprise event wedges itself between Google’s press announcement of its Bard AI technology and testing as well as a scheduled event on February 8, 2023, in which the company presumably will explain its AI efforts further.

Microsoft has already announced that it plans to fold ChatGPT into Bing search and previewed what the integration could look like with a few screenshots on the company’s search blog. In addition to Bing, Microsoft has already begun bringing ChatGPT-like functionality to its other software services such as Azure, Word, and Outlook.

Panos Panay, head of Windows and Devices has also mentioned how AI will power Windows development in the future, and we can responsibly expect to see possible ChatGPT integration come to Windows search, among other OS tools.

The next 48 hours should be pretty exciting for anyone invested in commercialized artificial intelligence via natural language queries.