Microsoft wants more people to use its search engine and browser, and AI appears to be the primary tool that the company will be leveraging to accomplish that. Available in preview now at Bing.com, Microsoft has launched an all-new Bing search engine and Edge browser that’s powered by AI, something that the Windows maker says enables better search, more complete answers, a new chat experience, and even the ability to generate content. Microsoft has described its new tools as an “AI copilot for the web.”
“AI will fundamentally change every software category, starting with the largest category of all – search,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “Today, we’re launching Bing and Edge powered by AI copilot and chat, to help people get more from search and the web.”
From a Microsoft blog post:
The new Bing and Edge – Your copilot for the web
We have brought together search, browsing and chat into one unified experience you can invoke from anywhere on the web, delivering:
- Better search. The new Bing gives you an improved version of the familiar search experience, providing more relevant results for simple things like sports scores, stock prices and weather, along with a new sidebar that shows more comprehensive answers if you want them.
- Complete answers. Bing reviews results from across the web to find and summarize the answer you’re looking for. 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.
- A new chat experience. For more complex searches – such as for planning a detailed trip itinerary or researching what TV to buy – the new Bing offers new, interactive chat. The chat experience empowers you to refine your search until you get the complete answer you are looking for by asking for more details, clarity and ideas – with links available so you can immediately act on your decisions.
- A creative spark. There are times when you need more than an answer – you need inspiration. The new Bing can generate the content to help you. 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. The new Bing also cites all its sources, so you’re able to see links to the web content it references.
- New Microsoft Edge experience. We’ve updated the Edge browser with new AI capabilities and a new look, and we’ve added two new functionalities: Chat and compose. With the Edge Sidebar, you can ask for a summary of a lengthy financial report to get the key takeaways – and then use the chat function to ask for a comparison to a competing company’s financials and automatically put it in a table. You can also ask Edge to help you compose content, such as a LinkedIn post, by giving it a few prompts to get you started. After that, you can ask it to help you update the tone, format and length of the post. Edge can understand the web page you’re on and adapts accordingly.
Reinventing search with AI
The new Bing experience is a culmination of four technical breakthroughs:
- Next-generation OpenAI model. We’re excited to announce the new Bing is running on a new, next-generation OpenAI 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 Prometheus model. We have developed a proprietary way of working with the OpenAI model that allows us to best leverage its power. We call this collection of capabilities and techniques the Prometheus model. This combination gives you more relevant, timely and targeted results, with improved safety.
- Applying AI to core search algorithm. We’ve also applied the AI model to our core Bing search ranking engine, which led to the largest jump in relevance in two decades. With this AI model, even basic search queries are more accurate and more relevant.
- New user experience. We’re reimagining how you interact with search, browser and chat by pulling them into a unified experience. This will unlock a completely new way to interact with the web.
Discussion (8 replies)
Join Discussion →yay?
So now I can chat with Bing?
Other assistants have female names: Siri, Alexa ... So why not give the Bing assistant a friendly male name such as "Chandler".
Wait... they built AI into their edge browser? How the fudge does that work. Or did they mean the edge browsers use of the default search engine of Bing? Scrubbing for metadata much? No thank you.
I had to look this up. I'm guessing it's still going back out into the cloud for this and it's not running on local hardware, but you never know:
That's kinda interesting and scary at the same time. WHERE that is running is VERY important to me. Meaning am I running that on local hardware with libraries to allow those decision trees to run even if they were 'trained' in the cloud by MS or whomever.
IF it is running locally can I restrict it from delivering that data back up into the cloud?
It REALLY bothers me from a professional standpoint the idea of just handing over sensitive data because I want to use an AI engine to interact with it.
Yep, yet another reason not to use Edge but MS has really embedded it into Windows (newsfeed and whatnot) and no matter how many ways you disable it, it always comes back like some kind of computer STD.
everything runs from the cloud.
If you use any smartphone or any smart device that connects to the cloud, I have bad news for you... :rolleyes: :rolleyes: