Microsoft announces its new search engine with OpenAI that promises to be 'more powerful than ChatGPT'
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- Microsoft just announced its latest search engine, the "new Bing."
- Created with OpenAI, it includes a chat extension that can help users plan trips and shop.
- The rise of OpenAI's ChatGPT tool has fueled the competition in Big Tech to boost search tools.
Microsoft announced "new Bing" on Tuesday, an overhauled version of its search engine made in collaboration with OpenAI that it promises to be "more powerful than ChatGPT." The new Bing will be live starting today, with limited capabilities.
The new Bing will run on a new next-generation language model Microsoft calls the "Prometheus model" designed specifically for search purposes. The model will help improve the relevancy of answers, annotate answers with specific web links and citations, and promote a better understanding of geolocation.
The search engine will also include a chat extension that Microsoft said can come in handy for things like "trip planning and shopping."
Users can "talk" to the search engine by asking it to recommend the cheapest TV when shopping or to create a itinerary for a five day trip with the family.
Bing will also be able to write "great emails with personalized touches," translate text in more than 100 languages, and generate things like trivia quizzes, the company says. It demoed the browser by asking it to "generate a draft" for a LinkedIn post.
Edge, Microsoft's web browser, will feature a Bing integration with a sidebar for chat to let users ask questions, such as pulling up an earnings report and asking for a summary.
The news comes just weeks after Microsoft announced that it will be investing billions of dollars into OpenAI to integrate ChatGPT-like tools into its products such as search engine Bing, Excel, and Powerpoint.
The move is part of an AI-arms race as other big tech companies rush to develop their own versions of highly capable chatbots to compete with ChatGPT.
Google, for example, unveiled Bard, a ChatGPT-like tool that runs on its internal language model called LaMDA, on Monday just weeks after Google executives declared a "code red" over ChatGPT. Google CEO Sundar Pichai has directed every Google employee to test the bot so it can be ready for release in a few weeks.
This is a developing story...
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