Microsoft’s Bing search engine will integrate the powerful capabilities of language-based artificial intelligence (AI) bot ChatGPT to challenge Google’s dominance, CEO Satya Nadella announced on Tuesday.

Microsoft hopes that beefing up its Bing search engine with AI bot ChatGPT will drastically update online search by providing users ready-made answers through multiple sources instead of the usual list of links to outside websites.

“It’s a new day for search… The race starts today,” Nadella said at the launch event.

Microsoft had in 2019 pumped $1 billion into San Francisco-based artificial intelligence start-up OpenAI. The two companies had formed a multi-year partnership to develop artificial intelligence supercomputing technologies on Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing service. OpenAI has developed the ChatGPT technology which Microsoft has now launched.

ChatGPT has sparked a gold rush in artificial intelligence technology (AI) with more than 100 million users testing the bot’s capabilities for getting essays and answers to exam questions within seconds. This is worrying school and college authorities since it raises the possibility of cheating in exams.

“We applied the AI model to our core search ranking engine, and we saw the largest jump in relevance in two decades,” Microsoft vice president Yusuf Mehd said.

Google’s search engine holds 84 percent of the global market share, bringing in tens of billions of dollars in ad sales every quarter and making up more than two thirds of the tech giant’s total revenue. Bing’s market share, on the other hand has been a mere nine percent.

According to reports, Google has also declared ChatGPT’s huge success as a “code red” threat and deployed teams to accelerate ongoing research on AI.

Google announced on Monday that it would be coming out with its own version of ChatGPT, a bot named Bard that would also provide near immediate answers upon request.