The Redmond, Wash.-based tech giant is partnering with San Francisco-based OpenAI and could roll out the updates to its search engine by the end of March, sources told The Information. Both companies declined to comment to the publication. (The Information)

Talking point: Microsoft is OpenAI’s biggest corporate backer. It put US$1 billion into the startup in July 2019, and the two firms have reportedly been negotiating a follow-on investment recently. For its capital, Microsoft bought a place at the front of the line to offer commercial applications of OpenAI’s technology. Bing has already benefited—in November, the service integrated image generator Dall-E. Adding full-sentence answers to queries of the sort that ChatGPT spits out would give the also-ran Bing a leg up in the race against search-by-word Google. Alphabet executives have issued a “code red” in response to the rise of such chatbot services, which some information-seekers might prefer to a list of links. Meanwhile, Google has poached an AI ethician from Microsoft.