Microsoft Introduces Bing Chat, A New ChatGPT-Like Tool To Answer Any And Every Question

Microsoft wants to cash in on the generative AI mania now that Google has also jumped into the arena with great vigor and unprecedented urgency. And what better way to move ahead than leveraging its partner OpenAI's ChatGPT to make Bing more useful? At its AI event today, Microsoft announced a whole new chatty experience for its laggard Bing browser that will make web searches truly convenient. At the heart of the improvements is Prometheus, a collection of abilities that leverages the best of ChatGPT's natural language processing chops. However, Microsoft says it is using a next-gen large language model developed by OpenAI that is even more powerful than ChatGPT and has been designed specifically for web search. Microsoft says it aims to deliver "more relevant, timely and targeted results, with improved safety."

Coming to the next-generation capabilities, Microsoft is baking a dedicated chat experience in Bing that is capable of writing emails, penning LinkedIn posts, planning full-fledged travel itineraries, detailing meal plans with specific dietary needs, and more. Users can even ask it to generate music trivia game plans. Microsoft is pushing it as a co-pilot experience for web browsing in Edge. The supercharged Bing chat system lives as a sidebar in Microsoft's Edge browser, and it will do a lot more than what ChatGPT is currently capable of. With Bing chat, Microsoft is taking ChatGPT's skills to the next level by letting an AI engine combine web search activity and present it in an interactive format.

Users can search for the financial results of a company in the Edge browser and then ask Bing Chat to either summarize it or just list the key stats and observations from the financial declarations. Going a step further, users will even be able to compare the financial results of two companies by just asking the AI to do so. According to Microsoft, the comparison results will be presented in a convenient table format so that users don't even have to deal with the hassle of copying and pasting between Edge and a spreadsheet. If you ask Bing's chat interface to write a post, the AI will oblige, and will even assist with tonality, word length, and format tuning for the post. 

Here’s the first demo of how the new Bing works! Using AI you’ll be able to get a quick summary to your questions on the side with links to the resources. pic.twitter.com/ZFA3rEgBn0

— iJustine (@ijustine) February 7, 2023

Depending on the web page you are browsing — for example, LinkedIn — the Bing Chat feature in Edge will improvise the results accordingly. In addition to summarizing results and giving verbose answers, Bing Chat will offer another huge advantage over ChatGPT — proper source citation. So, if you ask the Bing chat system to briefly list the best geneticists of the 21st century, it will not only provide a summarized answer aside from human-compiled lists but will also mention the name of the sources from which it scraped the answers. Microsoft, however, didn't offer any details about revenue-sharing models with sources cited in the search result summary. Given the current situation around AI training and related lawsuits, Microsoft would want to stay on the safe side.