I still remember the first time I used Google. I was a nerdy, internet-obsessed teenager, and for weeks I couldn’t stop telling my friends and family about the cool new search engine with the weird Seussian name: how fast it got results, how much more sophisticated and intuitive it was than existing search engines like AltaVista and WebCrawler and how magical it felt to be able to retrieve knowledge from the depths of the internet.
I felt a similar sense of awe this week when I started using the new, AI-powered Bing. (Yes, Bing, Microsoft’s eternally mocked search engine. It’s good now. I know I’m still adapting.)
Microsoft has released the new Bing, based on artificial intelligence software from OpenAI, the maker of the popular chatbot ChatGPT, with great fanfare at an event at the company’s headquarters on Tuesday. It was billed as a landmark event – Microsoft’s “iPhone Moment” – and many Microsoft executives, including CEO Satya Nadella, proudly walked through the conference center chatting with reporters and showing off the company’s new merchandise.
But the real star was Bing itself, or rather, the artificial intelligence technology that was integrated into Bing to answer users’ questions and chat with them about any topic imaginable. (Microsoft won’t say what version of the OpenAI software runs under the hood of Bing, but it’s rumored to be based on GPT-4, a language model yet to be released.)
Microsoft, which invested in OpenAI for the first time in 2019 and increased it again with a report $10 billion investment is this year using a wave of recent advances in AI capabilities to try to catch up with Google, which has long held a dominant position in the search market. (And who’s been spooked by all the recent ChatGPT hype about its release new proprietary AI tools.) Microsoft eventually plans to incorporate OpenAI’s technology into many of its products.
But the Bing relaunch is particularly significant for Microsoft, which has been struggling to gain a foothold in search for years. If it works, it could wipe out Google’s dominance and some of the more than $100 billion in annual search advertising revenue that comes with it.
The new Bing, which is now only available to a small group of testers and will soon be more widely available, looks like a cross between a standard search engine and a GPT-style chatbot. Type in a prompt — say, “Write me a menu for a vegetarian dinner party” — and the left side of your screen will fill with the default ads and recipe website links. On the right, Bing’s AI engine begins typing an answer in full sentences, often with links to the websites it’s pulling information from.
To ask a follow-up question or make a more detailed request — for example, “Write a grocery list for this menu, sorted by course, with the quantities needed to make enough food for eight people” — you can pop up a chat window open and type it. (For now, the new Bing only works on desktop computers running Edge, Microsoft’s web browser, but the company told me it plans to expand it to other browsers and devices at some point.)
I tested the new Bing for a few hours on Tuesday afternoon and it’s a definite improvement over Google. It’s also an improvement over ChatGPT, which despite its many capabilities was never designed to be used as a search engine. It does not cite sources and has trouble integrating current information or events. So while ChatGPT can write a nice poem about baseball or craft an irritated email to your landlord, it’s less suited to telling you what happened in Ukraine last week or where to find a decent meal in Albuquerque.
Microsoft has circumvented some of ChatGPT’s limitations by combining OpenAI’s language capabilities with Bing’s search capability using a proprietary tool called Prometheus. The technology roughly works by extracting search terms from users’ queries, running those searches through Bing’s search index, and then using those search results in combination with its own language model to formulate an answer. In both Microsoft’s demos and my own tests, Bing performed well on a variety of search-related tasks, including creating itineraries, brainstorming gift ideas, and summarizing book and movie plots.
Microsoft has also integrated OpenAI’s technology into Edge, its web browser, as a sort of overpowered typing assistant. Users can now open a panel in Edge, type in a general topic, and receive an AI-generated paragraph, blog post, email, or list of ideas written in one of five tones. (Professional, casual, informative, enthusiastic, or funny.) You can paste this text directly into a web browser, social media app, or email client.
Users can also chat with Edge’s built-in AI about any website they’re viewing and ask for summaries or additional information. In a high-profile demonstration on Tuesday, a Microsoft executive navigated to Gap’s website, opened a PDF of the company’s latest quarterly financial results, and asked Edge to both summarize key insights and create a table that collated the data with the latest financial results of another apparel company, Lululemon. The AI did both, almost instantly.
The new Bing is far from perfect. Like ChatGPT, it tends to spout confident-sounding nonsense, and its responses can be erratic. When I gave him a simple math puzzle – “If a dozen eggs cost $0.24, how many eggs can a dollar buy?” – the answer was wrong. (It said 100; the correct answer is 50.)
It also didn’t go well when I asked it for a list of kid-friendly activities happening in my hometown this coming weekend. Bing’s proposals included a New Year’s Day parade (which took place last weekend), a fundraiser for a local school (which took place two weekends ago), and a “tie-dye Hanukkah celebration” (which took place in mid-December).
There are legitimate questions too how fast all this AI technology is developed and used. And of course, using AI language models to answer search queries raises a litany of thorny questions about copyright, attribution, and bias. (To name just one obvious one, what happens to all those publishers who rely on Google for their traffic if nobody has to click links to their sites on Bing?)
However, if you focus on the areas where these tools fall short, you risk overlooking the amazing thing about what they get right. If the new Bing works, it won’t just be a better search engine. It’s a whole new way of interacting with information on the Internet, a way I’m still trying to fully grasp.
Microsoft chief technology officer Kevin Scott and OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman said in a joint interview Tuesday that they expect these issues to be addressed over time. It’s still early days for this type of AI, they said, and it’s too early to predict the downstream consequences of putting this technology into the hands of billions of people.
“With any new technology, you can’t perfectly predict every problem and workaround,” said Mr. Altman. “But if you put them through a very tight feedback loop, I think at the rate at which things are evolving, we can get to very solid products very quickly.”
Only one thing seems clear for the time being: After years of stagnation and standstill, Microsoft and OpenAI have made the search interesting again.
After submitting this column, I will do something I thought I would never do: I change my desktop computer’s default search engine to Bing. And Google, my go-to source of information for my entire adult life, will have to fight to get me back.
