Image: Microsoft
Microsoft on Tuesday held an in-person event in Seattle, Washington, where the company announced a number of new AI-centric innovations coming soon to its products (via The Verge).
The highlight of the event was Microsoft unveiling “the new Bing,” powered by a new next-generation large language model under a partnership with ChatGPT creator OpenAI. According to the company, the AI behind the new Bing is more powerful than ChatGPT and customized for search.
Microsoft wants to revolutionize search, which the company said during the event has remained largely the same over the last 20 years.
In addition to offering traditional search results, Bing will now answer users’ questions directly and offer creative assistance. Bing search results will now be displayed in a split-view, with search results on the left and a chatbox on the right with a generated answer and links to sources. Microsoft called it “your AI-powered copilot for the web.”
ChatGPT integration for Bing has long been rumoured, and the new interface looks exactly like a leak that surfaced last week. Bing will also get an improved search box that allows queries up to 1,000 characters.
“I think this technology is going to reshape pretty much every software category,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. Also in attendance at the event were OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Microsoft’s head of cloud and AI, Scott Guthrie, and Microsoft’s chief marketing officer, Yusuf Mehdi.
“The race starts today, and we’re going to move and move fast. Most importantly, we want to have a lot of fun innovating again in search, because it’s high time.”
Microsoft has partnered with OpenAI to create the “Prometheus model,” which the company said improves the relevancy of answers, introduces annotations, and ensures that the information returned to the user is up to date.
At the same time, Microsoft also announced a chat interface for Bing that will be completely separate from the search engine and focus on answers and natural communication. The chatbot will be able to translate into 100 languages.
Image: Microsoft
Bing is basically turning into ChatGPT, but with the ability to actually access the internet to pull current information and provide sources.
Microsoft compared the launch of ChatGPT to the birth of the Mosaic web browser in 1993, which kickstarted what we know today as the internet. Mehdi said Microsoft can “improve the way billions of people use the internet.”
During the event, Microsoft also outlined how it plans to integrate ChatGPT-like AI assistance into Windows and its default internet browser, Edge.
