Reinventing search with a new AI-powered Microsoft Bing and Edge

Post originally published by Yusuf Mehdi, Corporate Vice President & Consumer Chief Marketing Officer on February 7th at the Official Microsoft Blog

To empower people to unlock the joy of discovery, feel the wonder of creation and better harness the world’s knowledge, today is being improved how the world benefits from the web by reinventing the tools billions of people use every day, the search engine and the browser.

An AI-powered Bing search engine and Edge browser were launched to deliver better search, more complete answers, a new chat experience and the ability to generate content. These tools were thought 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.”

There are 10 billion search queries a day, but is estimated half of them go unanswered. That’s because people are using search to do things it wasn’t originally designed to do. It’s great for finding a website, but for more complex questions or tasks too often it falls short.

The new Bing and Edge – Your copilot for the web

It has been brought a 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 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. The new Bing can generate the content to help you. It can help you write an email, 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. The Edge browser has been updated with new AI capabilities and a new look, and it's been 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.

With the new Bing, exploring the web isn’t just easier, it’s also more fun. Ask it things like:

My anniversary is coming up in September, help me plan a trip somewhere fun in Europe, leaving from London.

I like electronic music and want to go to my first festival this year. Do you have any recommendations or tips for me?

Reinventing search with AI

The new Bing experience is a culmination of four technical breakthroughs:

• Next-generation OpenAI model. 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. It has been developed a proprietary way of working with the OpenAI model that allows us to best leverage its power. This collection of capabilities and techniques is called by the Prometheus model. This combination gives you more relevant, timely and targeted results, with improved safety.
• Applying AI to core search algorithm. The AI model has been applied to the 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. It's been reimagined 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.

These groundbreaking new search experiences are possible because Microsoft has committed to building Azure into an AI supercomputer for the world, and OpenAI has used this infrastructure to train the breakthrough models that are now being optimized for Bing.

Microsoft and OpenAI – innovating together, responsibly

Together with OpenAI, they’ve also been intentional in implementing safeguards to defend against harmful content. Their teams are working to address issues such as misinformation and disinformation, content blocking, data safety and preventing the promotion of harmful or discriminatory content in line with their AI principles.

The work they are doing with OpenAI builds on their company’s yearslong effort to ensure that their AI systems are responsible by design. They will continue to apply the full strength of our responsible AI ecosystem – including researchers, engineers and policy experts – to develop new approaches to mitigate risk.

Live today in limited preview, expanding to millions soon

The new Bing is available today in a limited preview on desktop, and everyone can visit Bing.com today to try sample queries and sign up for the waitlist. Microsoft going to scale the preview to millions in the coming weeks. A mobile experience will also be in preview soon.

Microsoft and OpenAI are excited to put the new Bing and Edge into the real world to get the critical feedback required to improve their models as they scale.

Original source

    Blogs, M. C. (2023, 22 febrero). Reinventing search with a new AI-powered Microsoft Bing and Edge, your copilot for the web - The Official Microsoft Blog. The Official Microsoft Blog. https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2023/02/07/reinventing-search-with-a-new-ai-powered-microsoft-bing-and-edge-your-copilot-for-the-web/