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Microsoft has launched a new version of its Bing homepage powered by AI, aka ‘Copilot for the Web,’ featuring an expanded chat box that can answer questions beyond factual ones. The company released the revamped search engine and Edge web browser at the surprise event, which they disclosed minutes after Google launched its conversational AI chatbot Bard yesterday.
Bing and Edge + AI: a new way to search starts today https://t.co/0y8sw7waNb
— Satya Nadella (@satyanadella) February 7, 2023
The company has created a next-generation large language model, more powerful than ChatGPT, specifically designed for search. It can answer questions with various contexts like ChatGPT, such as creating trip itineraries and quickly answering follow-up questions. The new technology ensures faster search results and improved geolocation understanding. The answers are also safer, as the system checks the queries against the answers before delivery.
The big tech also introduced the ‘Prometheus Model’ aimed to enhance Microsoft’s engagement with OpenAI’s technology by leveraging its web knowledge. The Prometheus Model will enhance the relevancy of answers by tuning queries with a better understanding of the web search index.
Although Microsoft is not using the ChatGPT tool itself, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, confirmed that Microsoft utilised some of OpenAI’s GPT-3.5 language technologies in Bing to enhance its functionality.
The new Bing search and Edge browser will be launched in a limited preview for desktop. During this initial phase, users will have limited searches available. A waitlist for the full version will be circulated in the coming weeks.
Additionally, Microsoft has plans to release a mobile version of Bing.
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This comes as Microsoft’s response to Google’s Bard, based on LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), unveiled by the company two years ago at Google I/O. Similar to ChatGPT, it draws information from the web.
Last week, there was a temporary leak of the new integration on Bing, where some users noticed a chat section featuring a UI similar to a chatbot. Microsoft earlier said that the new feature on Bing, simply referred to as “the new Bing” by Microsoft, promises to give “complete answers” to questions through Microsoft’s search engine.