View all on-demand sessions from the Intelligent Security Summit here.
The “race starts today” in the search, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said today at a special event at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington. “We’re going to move fast,” he added, as the company announced a revamped Bing search engine, Edge web browser and chat powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT and generative AI.
The new Bing for the desktop is available today on limited preview. And Microsoft says it’s launching a mobile version in a few weeks. There is no cost to use the new Bing, but ads will be there from the start, said Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, performed on stage at the event: “I think this is the beginning of a new era,” he told the audience, adding that he wants to put AI in the hands of more people, and that’s why OpenAI teamed up with Microsoft – starting with Azure and now Bing.
>>Follow VentureBeat’s ongoing ChatGPT coverage<
He concluded his remarks by saying, “We’re eager to learn from real-world usage.”
Microsoft has announced a new “AI-powered copilot” experience
At the center of a new “AI-powered copilot” experience is a new Bing search engine and Edge web browser, Mehdi said.
Bing runs on a new next-generation language model called Prometheus, he said, one more powerful than ChatGPT and adaptable for search (NOTE: Until now, neither Microsoft nor OpenAI have referred to this more advanced ChatGPT as the long-awaited GPT -4).
The Prometheus model, Mehdi said, offers several benefits, including improvements in the relevance of answers, annotating answers with specific web links, getting more up-to-date information and improving geolocation, and increasing the safety of questions.
As a result, there are already steady improvements to the Bing algorithm, he said. A few weeks ago, Microsoft applied AI to its core search index and saw the “biggest jump in relevance” in the past two decades.
Microsoft says it is ‘clear’ about unintended consequences of technology
In an introduction, Nadella said these announcements for Microsoft are about having “clear eyes” on technology’s unintended consequences, pointing to the company’s release of responsible AI principles back in 2016.
AI cues, he explained, come from humans — Microsoft, he said, wants to view the design of AI products as “first-class construction” and build that into our products. But that’s not enough, he added — the key is building AI that is “more in line with human values and social preferences.”
Sarah Bird, Microsoft’s responsible AI lead, took the stage to emphasize that with technology this powerful, “I know we have a responsibility to make sure it’s developed well.” Fortunately, she added, at Microsoft “we don’t start from scratch. We’ve been working on this for years. We are also not new to working with generative AI.”
New Microsoft Bing experience
According to a Microsoft blog postthe new Bing experience is the culmination of four technical breakthroughs:
- Next generation OpenAI model. We’re excited to announce that the new Bing runs on a new next-generation OpenAI language model that’s more powerful than ChatGPT and tailored specifically for search. It takes important lessons and advancements from ChatGPT and GPT-3.5 – and it’s even faster, more accurate, and more capable.
- Microsoft Prometheus model. We have developed our own way of working with the OpenAI model that allows us to make the most of its power. We call this collection of possibilities and techniques the Prometheus model. This combination gives you more relevant, timely and targeted results, with improved security.
- Apply AI to the core search algorithm. We also applied the AI model to our core search engine Bing, resulting in the biggest jump in relevancy in two decades. With this AI model, even simple searches are more accurate and relevant.
- New user experience. We’re reimagining how you interact with search, browser, and chat by bringing them together into a unified experience. This unlocks a whole new way to interact with the internet.
Announcements come as Google and Microsoft offer dueling debuts this week
The announcements come after Google and Microsoft, in separate surprise announcements, confirmed dueling generative AI debuts this week.
Yesterday, Google unveiled a new ChatGPT-like chatbot called Bardas it races to catch up in the wake of ChatGPT’s massive viral success (growing faster than TikTok, apparently). In a blog postCEO Sundar Pichai said Bard is now open to “trusted testers,” with plans to make it available to the public “in the coming weeks.”
In addition, the company announced called a streaming event Live from Paris focused on “Search, Maps and More,” livestreaming on YouTube at 8:30 a.m. ET on February 8. According to the description, “We’re reimagining how people seek, explore and interact with information, making it more natural and intuitive than ever before to find what you need.”
It’s only been ten weeks since OpenAI launched what it simply described as an “early demo”; part of the GPT-3.5 series – an interactive conversation model whose dialogue format “enables ChatGPT to answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge erroneous assumptions, and reject inappropriate requests.”
ChatGPT quickly captured the imagination – and feverish excitement – of both the AI community and the general public.
Since then, the tool’s capabilities – as well as its limitations and hidden dangers – have become well established. Rumors of Microsoft’s efforts to integrate ChatGPT into its Bing search engine, as well as productivity tools such as PowerPoint and Outlook, have been circulating for weeks. And all hints of slowing its development were quickly dashed when Microsoft announced its plans to invest billions more in OpenAI on Jan. 23.
VentureBeat’s mission is to become a digital city plaza where tech decision makers can learn about transformative business technology and execute transactions. Discover our Briefings.
