Microsoft sees ‘a new day in search’ with ChatGPT-powered Bing, Google offers Bard

One Thing Today in Tech

Microsoft has re-launched its search engine Bing with artificial intelligence features, the company said in a blog post yesterday. The new search engine is available for preview at bing.com. Microsoft is a large investor in Open AI, the research lab and company whose ChatGPT bot has taken the tech world by storm for its ability to deliver human-like responses. After losing the mobile operating system race to Google and Apple, Microsoft may now have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get ahead in search.

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Microsoft has re-launched its search engine Bing with artificial intelligence features, the company said in a blog post yesterday. The new search engine is available for preview at bing.com.

“AI will fundamentally change every software category, starting with the largest category of all – search,” Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella, said in the post. “Today, we’re launching Bing and Edge powered by AI co-pilot and chat, to help people get more from search and the web.”

Microsoft is a large investor in Open AI, the research lab whose ChatGPT bot has taken the tech world by storm for its ability to deliver human-like responses, generate content that would be considered creative – like poems – fix bugs in software code and pass MBA exams in ivy league colleges.

Microsoft says the new Bing is different in the following ways: Beyond generating a list of relevant links, Bing consolidates reliable sources across the web to give you a single, summarised answer.

The company claims you can search the way you talk, text, and think. Bing takes your complex searches and shares back a detailed response.

There is also a chat feature that you can use to naturally ask follow-up questions to your initial search to get personalised replies. Bing can be used as a creative tool. It can help you write poems, and stories, or even share ideas for a project.

“It's a new day in search,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told reporters yesterday at the company headquarters, Casey Newton, a widely followed tech futurist, reported in his popular newsletter.

“It's a new paradigm for search. Rapid innovation is going to come. The race starts today,” Nadella added.

In the past, Microsoft lost the mobile operating system race to Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS. And, up until now, its Windows browser Bing search was seen as a distant competitor to Google’s Chrome browser and Google search.

Using the reimagined Bing on stage, a top marketing executive at the company planned a five-day trip to Mexico City, identified the best 65” television, and then refined his query to find the best 65” TV for gaming. He generated a list of history’s top Japanese poets, augmented with sample haikus, and then put together a quiz about music in the 1990s, Newton writes in his newsletter.

All this the marketing executive did more or less instantly, Newton says, with the fluidity that is now familiar to users of ChatGPT but bolstered by the knowledge that soon this tool would be available to the masses, and for free.

Meanwhile, Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Feb. 6 that the company is releasing its own AI conversational service, called Bard.