Since Adding ChatGPT, Bing’s App Grew Almost As Much As All Last Year

Final yr, Bing’s cellular app had simply 800,000 downloads. However within the week since Bing introduced a integration with OpenAI’s ChatGPT, individuals have downloaded the Bing cellular app greater than 750,000 instances, peaking at over 150,000 installs a day.

Apparently, going viral works, even in the event you’re a large international software program large like Microsoft.

“I am in no way shocked by this,” says Appfigures CEO Ariel Michaeli, whose firm reported the information. “There’s a lot of pleasure round ChatGPT proper now and whereas it’s free to entry, it is virtually at all times unavailable until you might have a premium account.”

Microsoft’s funding in OpenAI and Bing’s integration with ChatGPT has the potential to revolutionize search by offering detailed, contextual solutions to look queries, reasonably than hyperlinks to potential solutions. Whereas there are clearly points with each the price of offering this type of reply and the truth that this new expertise is in some circumstances offering “unhinged,” factually incorrect, and even indignant responses to questions and conversations, there’s one thing qualitatively new about getting human-sounding solutions and responses from generative AI-powered answer-providing programs.

And that’s driving shopper curiosity and — maybe — search engine market share modifications.

In response to StatCounter, Google stays the undisputed heavyweight champion of the search engine wars, with a near-monopolistic 93% share of worldwide searches. Bing hovers round 3% of worldwide share, and Yahoo!, Yandex, Baidu, and DuckDuckGo take the slivers the stay. (To insert a small grain of salt into these statistics, Google doesn’t function in China, the place Baidu is the search chief, so Google’s lead is probably going largest in English and in Western nations, and never as giant globally as StatCounter studies.)

When your competitor outscores you 93% to three%, something you may can do to alter the outcomes is welcome, which is why Microsoft is bringing new expertise to the search engine struggle.

The problem: virality is commonly short-lived.

So whereas there was a flood of latest Bing customers downloading its cellular app, these are in all probability principally early adopters hoping to check the brand new expertise. And that preliminary flood has eased to extra of a trickle, as Bing app installs dropped from over 150,000 on February 8 to underneath 50,000 on February 14.

“The actual query nonetheless stays – is search higher with a wise answering service?” asks Michaeli.

That actually stays to be seen.

Google’s rushed announcement for its model of the ChatGPT expertise, referred to as Bard, included an error which buyers took as a foul signal for Google’s AI proficiency. They punished the corporate’s inventory, driving Alphabet inventory down 8% in a single day.

The almost certainly situation is that each Google and Bing — and others — work out tips on how to make generative AI reply expertise work higher over the following few years, which requires each offering higher (and safer) solutions, and reaching this at a suitable per-query price.

Which might lead to a greater search consumer expertise … even when the ensuing expertise professes love for you and tries to interrupt up your marriage.