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March 19, 2024

I still remember the first time I used Google. I’m a nerdy, internet-obsessed pre-teen, and after a few weeks I can’t stop telling my friends and relatives about this cool new search engine with the weirdly named Seuss: it retrieves results How faster, smoother, and more intuitive it is than existing search engines such as AltaVista and WebCrawler, and how magical it feels to be able to call up 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, the search engine that Microsoft mocked forever. It’s fine now. I know, and I’m adjusting too.)

Microsoft unveiled its new Bing to much fanfare Tuesday at an event at the company’s headquarters, powered by artificial intelligence software from OpenAI, maker of the popular chatbot ChatGPT. It was billed as a landmark event—Microsoft’s “iPhone moment”—and many Microsoft executives, including its chief executive, Satya Nadella, proudly milled around the convention center, talking to reporters and showing off the company’s New product.

But the real star is Bing itself, or rather, the artificial intelligence technology embedded in Bing to help answer users’ questions and chat with them about just about any topic imaginable. (Microsoft wouldn’t say which version of the OpenAI software runs under Bing’s hood, but rumor has it that it’s based on GPT-4, an as-yet-unreleased language model.)

Microsoft, which first invested in OpenAI in 2019 and reportedly invested another $10 billion this year, is taking advantage of a recent wave of advances in AI capabilities to try to overtake Google, which has long dominated OpenAI. Search the marketplace. (All the ChatGPT hoopla of late scared Microsoft into releasing a new AI tool of its own.) Microsoft eventually plans to integrate OpenAI’s technology into many of its products.

But Bing’s relaunch is especially important for Microsoft, which has struggled for years to gain a foothold in search. If it works, it could erode some of Google’s dominance and the more than $100 billion in annual search ad revenue that comes with it. The new Bing, which is currently available to a small group of testers and will soon be more widely available, looks like a hybrid between a standard search engine and a GPT-style chatbot. Type in a prompt — say, “write me a menu for a vegan dinner” — and the left side of your screen is filled with standard ads and links to recipe sites. On the right, Bing’s AI engine begins typing responses in full sentences, often annotated with links to the websites it retrieved 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 aisle, with enough of it to make enough food for eight people” — you can open a chat window, and enter it. (Right now, the new Bing is only available on desktop computers using Microsoft’s Edge web browser, but the company told me it plans to eventually expand to other browsers and devices.)

I tested the new Bing for a few hours on a Tuesday afternoon, and it’s a dramatic improvement over Google. It’s also an improvement over ChatGPT, which, despite its many features, was never designed to be used as a search engine. It did not cite its sources and had trouble incorporating the latest information or events. So while ChatGPT is fine for writing a nice poem about baseball or drafting a grumpy email to your landlord, it’s not very good for telling you what happened in Ukraine last week or where to find a decent meal in Albuquerque. meals.

Microsoft got around some of ChatGPT’s limitations by combining OpenAI’s language capabilities with Bing’s search capabilities, using a proprietary tool called Prometheus. The technology works roughly by extracting search terms from users’ requests, running those queries through Bing’s search index, and then using those search results combined with its own language models to formulate responses. In Microsoft’s demo and my own tests, Bing excelled at a variety of search-related tasks, including creating travel itineraries, brainstorming gift ideas, and summarizing book and movie plots.

Microsoft has also integrated OpenAI’s technology into its web browser, Edge, as a super-powerful writing assistant. Users can now open a panel in Edge, enter a general topic, and get an AI-generated list of paragraphs, blog posts, emails, or thoughts written in one of five tones. (Professional, Casual, Informational, Enthusiastic, or Fun.) They can paste that text directly into a web browser, social media application, or email client.

Users can also chat with Edge’s built-in AI about any website they’re viewing, asking for a summary or other information. In a jaw-dropping presentation Tuesday, a Microsoft executive visited The Gap’s website, opened a PDF containing the company’s latest quarterly financial results, and asked Edge to summarize key takeaways and create a table that compared the data to The latest figures compare the financial results of another apparel company, Lululemon. AI does both of these things almost instantaneously.

Kevin Roose and Casey Newton are the hosts of Hard Fork, a podcast that provides insight into the rapidly changing world of technology. Subscribe and listen.

The new Bing is far from perfect. Like ChatGPT, it’s easy to spout confident-sounding nonsense, and its answers can be erratic. When I gave it a basic math puzzle — “If a dozen eggs cost $0.24, how many eggs can you buy for a dollar?” — it got the wrong answer. (It said 100; the correct answer was 50.) Nor did it answer well when I asked it for a list of kid-friendly events happening in my hometown next weekend. Bing’s suggestions include a Lunar New Year parade (happened this past weekend), a fundraiser for local schools (happened two weeks ago), and a “tie-dye Hanukkah celebration” (happened in mid-December).

There are also legitimate questions about how quickly all these AI technologies can be developed and deployed. Of course, using AI language models to answer search queries raises a host of thorny questions about copyright, attribution, and bias. (To take an obvious example: if no one on Bing needs to click a link to their site, what happens to all the publishers who rely on Google as a traffic source?)

But focusing only on what these tools fall short of can miss the amazing things they get right. When the new Bing works, it’s not just a better search engine. It’s a whole new way of interacting with information on the Internet, and I’m still trying to figure out what it all means.

Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a joint interview Tuesday that they expect these issues to be resolved over time. Such artificial intelligence is in its early stages, they say, and it is too early to predict the downstream consequences of putting the technology into the hands of billions of people.

“With any new technology, you can’t perfectly predict all problems and mitigations,” Mr. Altman said. “But if you run a very tight feedback loop, at the rate things are going, I think we can get to a very solid product very quickly.”

Right now, only one thing seems clear: After years of stagnation and stagnation, Microsoft and OpenAI are making search fun again.

After submitting this column, I’m going to do something I thought I’d never do: I’m switching my desktop computer’s default search engine to Bing. And Google, my default source of information my entire adult life, is going to have to work hard to get me back.



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