At an event held at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, Microsoft planted its flag in the sand as a major player in the race to build products powered by artificial intelligence. The company is about to launch a new version of its Bing search engine with a customized version of AI that powers his ChatGPT, the chatbot in OpenAI that spread fear and wonder across the tech industry. .
Additionally, AI capabilities will be added to Microsoft’s Edge browser.in a blog post (opens in new tab)Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s chief consumer marketing officer and corporate vice president, wrote that Microsoft sees these tools as “the web’s AI co-pilot.”
The “New Bing” is now available in limited preview on desktop, with sample queries and a waiting list available.
Microsoft, long a minor player in search compared to Google, is pushing AI as a way to completely change the search engine experience.
Microsoft lists a number of ways AI can help search from anywhere on the web. This includes better and more relevant search results (including a sidebar with more detailed results) and summaries of answers from multiple results. This means you don’t have to actually click. For one, “you can get detailed instructions on how to replace the eggs in the cake you’re baking at that moment with another ingredient, for example, without scrolling through multiple results,” he says. I am writing.
There’s also chat, popularized by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which allows you to continuously refine what you’re looking for, so Microsoft says you’ll get a more complete answer.
At the event, Microsoft showed AI writing LinkedIn posts in a new feature in Edge, an AI-based sidebar. “Write emails, create his five-day itinerary for his dream vacation to Hawaii, book travel and accommodations, prepare for job interviews, create trivia questions. It helps create links to do,” Mehdi wrote. “The new Bing also cites all sources so you can see links to his web content you’re referring to.”
Edge also lets you ask for a summary of what you’re looking at. At the event, the company showed how the AI outlined the company’s financial report, compared it to its competitors, and tabulated all the numbers.
Microsoft uses a custom version of OpenAI’s large scale language model. It’s “more powerful than ChatGPT and tailored specifically for searching. It incorporates significant learnings and advancements from ChatGPT and GPT-3.5, making it even faster, more accurate, and more capable.” Microsoft didn’t say anything about the rumored GPT 4.
Additionally, Microsoft has its own “Prometheus” model, designed to work with OpenAI’s technology to improve safety and deliver the most relevant results. The addition of AI to Bing’s search ranking algorithm will result in “the biggest relevance leap in the last 20 years,” the company says.
Microsoft has built Azure data centers as a primary business goal for years, so it’s poised for more AI training and scaling. Unlike Google, search is not a core business, so the company appears to be taking big risks on search. Microsoft missed the call and lagged behind in browsers.
Google is hosting its own competitive event tomorrow, so we’ll take a look at how the new Bard chatbot and AI, powered by the LaMDA model, will impact your search efforts.
