At a private event held at the company’s Redmond headquarters today, Microsoft invited OpenAI on stage to announce a partnership that will bring us “The New Bing,” a reimagined search experience that builds on the success of ChatGPT and similar AI-powered tools. Microsoft declined to name-drop any specific learning model, but it’s widely speculated that its “next-generation” model is based on GPT-4, which is expected to be trained on a dataset comprising billions of text inputs as opposed to the current generation’s low millions.
On the web, the new Bing will clearly separate its landers for traditional search queries and your chat-heavy needs, though it sounds like both sides of this coin will eventually work harmoniously. From the sounds of Microsoft’s ambitious presentation, we can expect it to permeate not just Microsoft’s web search offering but eventually grow into a major component of the Windows experience at large.
In addition to a newly designed Edge browser, complete with a designated Bing Chat button, that blends better with Windows 11, we’ll see a refined user experience that puts search front and center, according to the company. Its envisioned future sounds like the evolution we’d originally hoped to see with Cortana, Microsoft’s defunct digital voice assistant that was appropriately named after the powerful sentient AI helper featured throughout the “Halo” video game series.
