You can barely blink in 2023 without a conversational AI worming its way into one of your favorite products. Well, “favorite” might be pushing it, but as previously rumored, Bing now has ChatGPT integration. There’s a waitlist to access the new features, but you can get closer to the front of the line if you’re willing to dive headfirst into Microsoft’s ecosystem.
Microsoft is making “the new Bing” available on desktop to a limited number of users. You can sign up for access, but there’s a waitlist. Conveniently, you can jump to the head of the line if you’re willing to install the Bing app on your phone and change your desktop’s defaults to Microsoft’s apps. You won’t be able to take the new AI for a spin until your number comes up. But you can peek at some examples Microsoft has listed on its landing page, including gems like “Arts and crafts ideas, with instructions for a toddler using only cardboard boxes, plastic bottles, paper, and string.” The new Bing’s search box can accommodate up to 1,000 characters, so you can really go nuts with the prompt details, and the chat feature lets you have a conversation with the bot based on your original query.
The other side of Microsoft’s AI push is in the Edge browser, which is getting an AI “copilot.” You’ll be able to pop open a side panel on any webpage or document, use the ChatGPT-powered cloud to produce content summaries, and even generate new text right on the spot. In its demo, Microsoft used Copilot in Edge to make a post on LinkedIn and rewrite some code. A new dev build of Edge includes this feature, which will be exclusive to Edge for now. According to Microsoft, the intention is to make the copilot available for all browsers, but other Chromium-based platforms must implement some new features first.
While you can access ChatGPT on its own, the AI rolling out in Microsoft’s products has been adapted for the use case. In an interview with The Verge, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella reveals the version of ChatGPT living inside Microsoft’s search and browser products is the next-generation model. Further, Nadella says that it worked with OpenAI to adapt the model to work with search data — it is “grounded in search.” When asked how natural language answers could reduce traffic to the original source of the AI’s data (i.e., publishers), Nadella danced around the issue. He notes that the new Bing will cite its sources, allowing people to “dig deeper” like they do with the lower-quality answers generated by current search engines. That seems debatable at best.
Nadella says he only entered his first query into the new AI last summer, and he knew instantly it was going to be important. Just six months later, Microsoft is rolling it out as a product, which is blazing fast for a behemoth tech firm like Microsoft. Clearly, the OpenAI partnership is paying off. It’s even spurring Google to stop talking about AI research and use that research to create a product in the form of Bard. There are still a lot of unanswered questions around fair use, copyright, and accuracy, but the biggest technology companies in the world are convinced a new generation of chatbots will be the future of search. They’re doing it live.
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