Microsoft’s Bing that has long been a minor player in the world of search engines compared to the tech giant Google may finally have its shot at competing with the Mountain View giant. The company last week announced a new version of Bing powered by a more advanced version of OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 language model. While the new Bing for now is available to only select users, it has already garnered huge interest, with a million people signing up on the waitlist to try it out in just 48 hours.
“We’re humbled and energized by the number of people who want to test-drive the new AI-powered Bing! In 48 hours, more than 1 million people have joined the waitlist for our preview. If you would like to join, go to http://bing.com/new!,” Microsoft’s corporate vice president and consumer chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi wrote in a tweet.
Microsoft announced the AI-backed Bing a week ago. The announcement came briefly after Google introduced its ChatGPT rival named Bard to the world. The new Bing along with new Edge browser are powered by AI copilot and chat, “to help people get more from search and the web.”
“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,” Microsoft describes the new Bing in a blog post.
Along with new Bing, Microsoft is also injecting new powers and capabilities in the Edge browser. It has added two new features- chat and compose in the Edge’s sidebar. While chat will allow users to get a summary of content on a webpage and then ask questions like compare financial results of two companies, the compose feature can be used for writing content like LinkedIn and other social media posts or a quick email with a few prompts.
