What you need to know
- Microsoft announced a new AI-powered Bing search and Edge browser.
- The new search experience promises to provide improved search results, a new interactive chat, and a compose feature for Edge.
- The new Bing and Edge AI experiences are powered by a next-gen language model that’s more powerful than ChatGPT.
- Google recently announced that it’s testing its own AI chat experience using LaMDA.
Microsoft revealed at an event on Tuesday that it is launching a new AI-powered experience for Bing and the Edge browser. The upgrade is powered by OpenAI, the company behind the popular ChatGPT service.
With the new AI capabilities, Microsoft promises (opens in new tab) a better search with “more relevant results” and a new sidebar for comprehensive results. And because it’s built on advancements from ChatGPT 3.5, Bing can take advantage of the features users may come to expect from the service. That means Bing can generate more comprehensive answers to searches with a new side panel, or you can utilize the new interactive chat feature for more complex queries.
With the new Bing, users will now find a chat box instead of a search box, which will have a character limit of 1,000.
With the Edge browser, users will be able to use a Edge Sidebar to inquire about content displayed on your screen. For example, Microsoft says you can use the Compose function to help generate content or the Chat feature to summarize a report.
“AI will fundamentally change every software category, starting with the largest category of all – search,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. “Today, we’re launching Bing and Edge powered by AI copilot and chat, to help people get more from search and the web.”
Microsoft says it was able to leverage ChatGPT’s capabilities for this customized search experience thanks to a new Prometheus model, which helps provide “relevant, timely and targeted results.” In fact, Microsoft is utilizing a next-gen language model from OpenAI that’s more powerful (and more up-to-date) than ChatGPT. The result is that Bing’s search ranking engine has seen its biggest improvements in decades, and results are more relevant and accurate than ever. This could give Microsoft the boost it needs to really challenge Google and put Bing on the map.
For now, a limited preview is available for those who want to try it out with small, pre-made queries. You can also sign up for a waitlist for a fuller experience. Microsoft says it plans to expand the preview in the coming weeks on both desktop and mobile devices.
This notably comes just a day after Google announced that it’s testing its own AI chat service called Bard, powered by a lightweight version of LaMDA. The service is only available in limited testing but provides similar enhancements by providing more relevant and conversational results to search queries. It may be some time before Google makes it widely available, but as popular as the AI chatbot craze is, the company seemingly doesn’t want to get this wrong.
