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Microsoft announced major changes to its native search engine Bing at a press event held at its Redmond HQ on February 7. It’ll now be powered by an upgraded version of the same AI engine that powers OpenAI’s viral chatbot ChatGPT. In addition to a UI redesign and some extra features to Bing, the company is also upgrading its Edge browser.Â
These updated versions of Bing and Edge are going live for a limited preview before the full launch. Users can try a limited number of queries and sign up for full access starting February 7. This preview is also limited to desktops and the mobile version will be released in the coming months.Â
The search engine will run on a next-generation LLM model from OpenAI that’ll be more powerful than ChatGPT. The redesigned search box can also take up to 1,000 character queries.
The Core Search Index has also improved by applying the same AI model to the search algorithm, giving Bing its largest jump in answer relevancy ever
This will work using a new way of working with OpenAI called the Prometheus Model. This can improve the relevancy of the search results, annotate answers, and ensure they’re up to date with the latest information, among other things.Â
Bing now also offers a new chat function where users can interface directly with GPT-4, the latest AI language model from OpenAI. Users can ask questions and receive answers in natural language. It can also translate languages for you, supporting over 100 languages.Â
The chat window runs side by side with the new Bing showing annotations and a chat interface. The company showed off several example searches, including recipes, travel tips, furniture shopping from Ikea and more.
Edge is also getting new features, including a Bing button that’ll make the chat interface available inside Edge without users having to use the search engine. This brings all the functionality of a chatbot like ChatGPT to a sidebar in Edge that can be used across documents and web pages alike. As demonstrated on stage, it can even write emails, and social media posts and rewrite code snippets in other languages.
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