Microsoft has as predicted added artificial intelligence capabilities to a waitlisted version of its Bing search engine, in an effort to compete in the online advertising market against leader Google.
The IT giant's consumer chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi said that the Bing preview, along with a version of Microsoft's Chromium-based Edge browser can be thought of as
an AI co-pilot for the web."
Prior to the Bing and Edge previews, Microsoft had launched the AI Co-Pilot tool for its Github open source code repository.
Microsoft said that of around 10 billion search queries entered by people, an estimated half of these are left unanswered.
"That's because people are using search to do things it wasn't originally intended to do," Mehdi wrote.
"It's [traditional search] great for finding a website but for more complex questions or tasks it falls short.
Mehdi added that the new Bing experience is based on a next-generation OpenAI large language model that is more powerful than ChatGPT and GPT-3.5, and which is specifically optimised for search.
Microsoft said it has developed a "proprietary way of working with the OpenAI model" to best leverage its power; the company calls this the Microsoft Prometheus model.
Bing's core search algorithm has been tweaked with the AI model as well, which Microsoft claims has led to the largest jump of relevance in two decades.
As an example of what the AI powered Bing can provide answers for, Microsoft suggested creative queries such as "I like electronic music and want to go to my first festival this year; do you have any recommendations or tips for me?"
Meanwhile, the Edge web browser has been updated with AI capabilities and a new look, including the chat and compose functionalities, Microsoft said.
Users wanting to try out the new Bing can sign up to a waitlist with a Microsoft account.
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