Microsoft is holding a surprise, and secretive, launch event at its Redmond headquarters on Tuesday, Feb 7. It might be Bing ChatGPT integration‘s coming out to party or something else altogether, we just don’t know yet.
The Windows 11 parent company sent out invites to a select group of tech media and analysts last week, but is only allowing everyone to talk about it – after some possible leaks – today.
In the invite the company says it’s «sharing progress on a few exciting projects» and that CEO Satya Nadella will lead the discussion. What’s missing here is, well, a number of things. The company has no plans to live stream the event; it’s also offered zero information about the kinds of products, projects, or even product categories that will be discussed.
What we do and don’t know
What we do know is that there will be hands-on demos. That could be hardware like a Microsoft Surface Duo 3 smartphone. But with the recent apparent Bing ChatGPT leaks, many people are betting we’ll see an artificially intelligence-inseminated search engine instead.
As described by Owen Yin (via The Verge), who got brief access to what might be the next generation of Microsoft’s search engine, Bing would integrate a very ChatGPT-like interface that could accept natural-language queries and return some very smart results. The standard Bing search engine would, based on this possible leak, live on beside the AI integration.
Microsoft’s news comes just as Google unveiled its ChatGPT rival, Bard AI, in a very limited release but with a promise of it coming to Google Search soon.
Surface products, the laptop kind by the way, are unlikely, The company rolled out its entire new Surface line, including the Surface Pro 9 5G, Surface Laptop 5 and Surface Studio 2 Plus less than four months ago. Also unlikely is anything to do with the Microsoft Hololens, a mixed reality headset and part of the business that now appears to be running on fumes.
We have good news, though. Whatever Microsoft and Nadella are planning tomorrow, TechRadar will be there, on the ground. Your intrepid reporter has an invite and is on his way there right now. We’ll share more details as we get them. Be sure to lock into TechRadar and this reporter’s Twitter feed for live details.