At its event on Tuesday, Microsoft announced a new version of Bing that’s “more powerful than ChatGPT.” The proprietary new search technology, called “the Prometheus model” is described as “your co-pilot for the web” and is powered by ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
New features include more relevant search ranking, generating content, and a chat feature to learn more about search results.
Credit: Microsoft Bing
In a demo during the event, Tom’s Guide, which attended the event in person, described a video of “someone asking Bing to write an email outlining a family trip to Mexico (just planned with Bing), then translate that letter to Spanish.” TechRadar described another demo where Bing founds egg substitutes in a recipe and suggested the exact ingredient in all-natural language. Microsoft has also announced integration of this search technology into its web browser Edge as an icon in the upper-right corner.
Credit: Microsoft Bing
The new and improved AI-powered Bing is available today in limited preview mode for desktops (mobile soon to come) and will be more widely available to preview in the coming weeks.
Since OpenAI released the latest version of ChatGPT in December, it has become the fastest growing app of all time. Its intelligence is more advanced than other chatbots currently available, which has made it popular for a wide range of use cases including writing articles, job applications, school essays, and coding malware.
Other less terrifying uses include fighting a denied healthcare claim, answering life’s greatest mysteries, and passing “the Nazi test.” When it was reported that Microsoft was investing billions of dollars in OpenAI, it prompted both speculation about how the technology would be scaled. Last week, rumors about the integration intensified when a new Bing interface using ChatGPT appeared then quickly disappeared.
Bing announcement follows Google’s Bard reveal
It has also prompted action from Google executives who declared a “code red.” It almost feels like an understatement to say Google has dominated the search engine game. Like Kleenex or Band-Aid, “Googling” is synonymous with searching for information on the internet.
Google has 92 percent of the world’s market share compared to Bing’s 2 percent. But ChatGPT’s integration with Bing is enough of a threat to Google’s piece of the pie that Google has scrambled to launch its own conversational AI tool Bard and host an event this Wednesday (the day after Microsoft’s announcement.)
Whether ChatGPT’s integration with Bing is enough to lure users away from Google remains to be seen. But consider this announcement the starting pistol for the race to win the new era of search.
