In a Tuesday blog post, Microsoft went all in on AI-driven searches. The company launched the new AI-powered Bing and Microsoft Edge browser incorporating an AI copilot and chat feature.
Last month, Microsoft announced a multi-billion dollar partnership with OpenAI, the company that created the DALL-E 2 AI image generator and the ChatGPT AI language model. The new search engine, working on what Microsoft has dubbed OpenAI’s “Prometheus Model” should allow users to input a question and receive a detailed, up-to-date, and annotated answer along with citations from relevant sites. The company claimed this new system is “more powerful than ChatGPT.”
There’s two parts to this: the search function and the chat bot. The new interactive chat lets users refine their search after their initial prompt. The company said the new system should allow people to get a detailed itinerary of a planned vacation, or a list of the best TVs to buy alongside citations from different websites.
The new chat also has integrations along the same lines as ChatGPT, letting users ask the AI to write emails for them or create a quiz. Bing has long been the butt of jokes for how irrelevant its search results have been, but Microsoft claimed it “applied the AI model to our core Bing search ranking engine, which led to the largest jump in relevance in two decades.”
“AI will fundamentally change every software category, starting with the largest category of all – search,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said in the blog post.
Microsoft Edge is also changing to include Chat directly on the Edge sidebar. The company used the example of asking the system to compose a LinkedIn post with a few prompts. Microsoft even claimed users can manipulate and further refine the tone of the content it produces. The new Edge also gives users the option to input content like a long financial report and then force it to offer you bullet points of the main takeaways.
The new Bing search should be available on a limited preview for desktop, but users can visit the Bing website to sign up for a waitlist. The company plans to scale the preview version in the coming weeks and will also offer a mobile preview as well.