At an event at its Redmond, Washington headquarters, Microsoft planted its flag in the sand as a major player in the race to build out products with artificial intelligence. The company is launching a new version of its Bing search engine with a customized version of the AI that powers ChatGPT, OpenAI's chatbot that has spread fear and wonder through the tech industry.
In addition, AI features will be added to Microsoft's Edge browser. In a blog post, Microsoft's consumer chief marketing officer and corporate vice president Yusuf Mehdi wrote that Microsoft considers "these tools as an AI copilot for the web."
The "new Bing" is available in a limited preview on desktop now, with sample queries and a waitlist available.
Microsoft, long a minor player in search when compared to Google, is pushing AI as a way to completely change the search engine experience.
Microsoft listed a slew of ways that AI can assist with search from anywhere on the web, including better, more relevant search results (including a sidebar for more detailed results) and summarizing answers from multiple results — which could mean you never need to actually click on one: "For example, you can get detailed instructions for how to substitute eggs for another ingredient in a cake you are baking right in that moment, without scrolling through multiple results," Mehdi writes.
There will also be chat, which OpenAI's ChatGPT has popularized, which Microsoft says will get more complete answers because you can continuously refine what you're looking for.
At the event, Microsoft showed AI writing a LinkedIn post in a new feature for Edge, an AI-based sidebar. "It can help you write an email, create a 5-day itinerary for a dream vacation to Hawaii, with links to book your travel and accommodations, prep for a job interview or create a quiz for trivia night," Mehdi writes. "The new Bing also cites all its sources, so you’re able to see links to the web content it references."
In Edge, you'll also be able to ask for a summary of of what you're looking at. At the event, the company showed the AI outlining a company's financial report, and then comparing it to a competitor and putting all of the numbers in a table.
Microsoft is using a custom version of OpenAI's large language model that is "more powerful than ChatGPT and customized specifically for search. It takes key learnings and advancements from ChatGPT and GPT-3.5 – and it is even faster, more accurate and more capable." Microsoft didn't say anything about GPT 4, which had been rumored.
In addition, Microsoft has its own "Prometheus" model, designed to work with OpenAI's tech to improve safety and provide the most relevant results. By adding AI to Bing's search ranking algorithm, it says it's getting "The largest jump in relevance in two decades."
Microsoft has been building out its Azure data centers as a primary business objective for years, so the company is ready for more AI training and for scaling. The company can seemingly afford big risks with search, as, unlike Google, it's not a core business. Microsoft missed phones and fell behind in browsers, and it appears hungry for a fight here.
Google has its own competing event tomorrow, so we'll see how its new Bard chatbot and AI powered by its LaMDA model will affect its search efforts.
