Microsoft has expanded its commitment to artificial intelligence even further. The company announced today that its Bing search engine and Edge browser will include a chat window where you can ask questions. The answers are provided by the Prometheus model, a new next-generation language model developed in collaboration with OpenAI, the developers of ChatGPT.
The announcement comes just hours after Google announced it would be integrating its own chatbot, Bard, into the world’s most-used search engine, and two weeks after Microsoft announced its intention to invest $10,000 million in OpenAI, a company Since ChatGPT popularized generative artificial intelligence two months ago, a key question has hovered in the industry: Would it end up displacing traditional search engines? Did this chatbot threaten Google’s supremacy?
Microsoft quickly incorporated it into its products. The new engine, the company says, will enable better search on many levels. It answers users’ questions and looks for a relationship with the machine that is as similar as possible to talking to a friend. “We’re going to make it incredibly easy to use. You can of course chat and ask questions,” said Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s vice president and head of marketing, in a presentation also attended by Satya Nadella, the company’s CEO, and Sam Altman, head of OpenAI.
Aspect of the chat that opens when searching in new Bing.
The new Bing will be available starting today in a desktop version for a limited number of users and will expand to “millions of people” (who can sign up for a waitlist) in the coming weeks. The mobile version will also come out later, the Microsoft CEO said. This upgrade does not include additional payments.
Bing also automatically generates content “to help you get started.” For example, create an email that summarizes the itinerary of a prepared trip. From Microsoft, they present generative artificial intelligence as a supportive tool in creative work, not as a replacement. “We believe that artificial intelligence will revolutionize all categories of software,” Nadella said.
Prometeo improves the relevance of the answers, offers updated results (which failed, for example, with ChatGPT), allows commenting on the answers that interest us the most and takes into account elements such as geolocation to refine the information returned to the user. “This new engine, which includes Bing, is powered by one of our next-gen models that leverages key learnings from ChatGPT 3.5,” said Altman of OpenAI.
The way users search for information has changed, and artificial intelligence can help refine the answers, Microsoft executives say. Mehdi gave an example during his presentation. When you look for the dimensions of a piece of furniture, the main thing you want to know is whether it fits in your room or in the trunk of your car. So you can better ask if the loveseat will fit in your Honda Odyssey and the artificial intelligence will give you the dimensions of the sofa, the trunk and an estimate if it will fit or not.
A working document opens with the new chat window on the right.
Microsoft wants surfing and searching the web to take the form of a conversation. That we talk to the programs instead of searching with keywords as before. This will radically change the search experience and make it more complete.
According to company management, the integration of Prometeo, the generative artificial intelligence engine, has been accompanied by notable improvements in the accuracy and relevance of the results provided by the Bing search engine. Until now, that was the main flaw that made most users prefer alternatives like Google. Microsoft has also applied the new AI model to search, so the result will probably be better than before.
Bing now allows searches with texts of up to 1,000 characters. Once the search has been formulated, a list of results appears as usual in the left column. And on the right, a series of links that respond in more creative ways, expanding content and suggesting others. The idea seems to be that the user can see the two search types at a time (the traditional one and the one assisted by generative AI) and from there follow the path that they want the most.
Search has less to do with typing in keywords and more to do with posting ideas and requests. Mehdi gave the example that someone who is allergic to eggs can ask Bing to update a specific recipe with substitutes for that specific food. The engine gives you a new recipe with the exact ingredients and quantities as if a vegan chef were talking to the user.
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