Microsoft Corp. today unveiled a revamp of its Bing search engine and Edge web browser powered by OpenAI LLC’s popular ChatGPT artificial intelligence chatbot AI, in a bold bid to boost their search and answer capabilities.

Announced at a press briefing today in Seattle, the news comes shortly after Microsoft made plans to invest billions in OpenAI and a day after Google LLC announced its own plans to roll out its own rival AI tool similar to ChatGPT called Bard in the coming weeks.

Thanks to OpenAI’s making ChatGPT widely available recently, there has been an explosion of interest in the “generative AI” technology behind these chatbots. Generative AI, to use ChatGPT’s own definition, is a subfield of AI that focuses on generating new, original content that resembles existing data.

Sam Altman, chief executive of OpenAI, said Microsoft and OpenAI have been working together for over three years. The new integration will take key enhancements from GPT-3.5 and its models are faster, more capable and specifically optimized for search. He said he looks forward to working with Microsoft in the future and that both companies share a “deep sense of responsibility in ensuring that AI gets deployed safely” — a major concern that has held back rivals such as Google and Meta Platforms Inc. from moving faster to deploy their own chatbots.

Microsoft said the new AI large language model that it is working on to power its Bing revamp is called “Prometheus” and is specially customized based on ChatGPT technology.

ChatGPT and other AI similar to it offer conversational capability, which means that the system on the other end can understand natural language more readily. Microsoft intends to put this to use for searches by making it easier for users to describe what they’re searching for without having to narrow their terms, but also at the same time having the AI delve through the documents on the web to find more relevant results.

Aside from more relevant searches, Bing will include a sidebar that will annotate results with more comprehensive answers related in case the user needs them such as expanding on stock information, sports team data, weather forecasts and more.

The new Bing will also allow users to input queries up to 1,000 characters long, allowing them significant space to post questions for the AI search.

Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella referred to this as a “new paradigm for search” and a “new copilot” experience for users during his keynote, referring to how AI tools can help perform tasks for workers.

In addition to enhancements to search, the addition of AI to the Bing search engine and browser will be adding a Chat tab to allow users to hold conversations with the AI and receive answers to questions.

Chat goes beyond regular search. For example, it can answer questions about cooking recipes if you’ve forgotten a specific key ingredient or want to pick a substitute, so the AI can act like an astute chef that can figure out the substitution as well as the proper conversion. On the same subject of cooking, the chat could even offer up a meal plan for a vegetarian family who happens to have a member who is allergic to nuts. After doing so, the Bing chat can then produce a full shopping list for the ingredients for all the meals and preparation instructions.

The same chat interface can produce a travel itinerary for a five-day trip to Mexico City, including what sights to see and restaurants to visit for a full cultural experience. The conversation doesn’t stop there. With the chat interface open, you can ask, “How much will this trip cost?” or “Can we add something to the itinerary?” The AI will follow up with answers or add extra items to the answer, updating the result as it goes.

All of these examples come from conversational English questions submitted in the chat written as if they were being spoken to another.

Microsoft plans to roll out the new Bing interface worldwide but at a slow pace in the coming weeks, as well as a mobile version. The new experience is already available in a limited preview today for desktop users and there is a waitlist for those who want to get into the expanded rollout sooner.

Image: Microsoft