For those who came in late Microsoft said that it was incorporating OpenAI's GPT-4 into its Bing search engine putting the fear of God into Google which depends on advertising based on its search. 

While it is unclear how much GPT-4 would improve Bing, Google pulled engineers from other projects to work on building a rival AI chatbot-powered search

CEO Sundar Pichai said: "I'm excited by the AI-driven leaps we're about to unveil in search and beyond." 

Google's AI model – LaMDA uses language models "as a companion to search" and will be showing off how it will be incorporated Google Search, Maps, and more will be unveiled next week, according to an invite for a live event on 8 February.

Reuters last week reported that Baidu will launch an AI-powered chatbot in March 2023. This will be Baidu's second big AI announcement for the year. In January it announced video content generation tools said to be capable of service as screenwriter, illustrator, editor or animator, with models ERNIE 3.0 Zeus and ERNIE-ViLG 2.0 providing the necessary data.