Samsung is believed to be close to cutting a deal to make Microsoft’s Bing the default search engine on tens of millions of their smartphones and tablets.

The big South Korean Company faces losing A$4.48 billion in annual revenue from Google, with questions now being asked as to how much Microsoft is going to pay.

Bing’s threat to Google’s search dominance has grown more credible in recent months with the addition of Open Ai’s technology to provide ChatGPT-like responses to user queries, claims the New York Times.

Samsung shipped 261 million smartphones in 2022, according to IDC data, and the loss of Google could spark a massive backlash against Samsung, while playing into the hands of Motorola, who are quietly taking market share away from Samsung in the ‘affordable premium’ and ‘value’ markets, where Samsung competes with their A series and bottom-end Galaxy S series devices.

Samsung already has a close business relationship with both Microsoft with their Office 365 suite of tools now integrated into the Tizen OS across monitors smartphones and Samsung tablets.

Nowadays, most Samsung devices come preloaded with a library of apps and services from both Google and Microsoft, including OneDrive and Google Maps, with Samsung reaping billions from third-party deals.

The only thing that could stop the deal is a higher fee offer from Google or a massive backlash from Samsung customers who hate Bing and Microsoft’s search engines.

Google is currently working on several projects to update and renew its search services to avoid losing ground as various Governments, including the Australian Government, question Google practises.

Those include adding artificial intelligence features to its existing offerings, under a project named Magi, which has more than 160 people working on it, the Times reported.

A representative from Samsung declined to comment.

Google currently has a $30 billion dollar deal with Apple to use their search engine worldwide.

Bloomberg said that large language models, such as the one underpinning ChatGPT and the chatbot functionality in Microsoft’s Bing, are not new to Google.

The company has been using LLMs to anticipate the intent of users’ queries, Google’s chief business officer said on the company’s fourth-quarter earnings call in February. Google is also rolling out Bard, its own chatbot search assistant, though doing so at a very cautious pace.