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Mere months after it surprised everyone—Google included—with the new AI-powered Bing Chat, Microsoft has decided to open the service up to everyone. All you need is a Microsoft account, and you can query the company’s advanced chatbot based on OpenAI’s GPT-4 language model. Microsoft is also adding new features to Bing Chat and promising even more.
Microsoft got everyone excited about the age of AI-assisted search several months ago with a well-orchestrated demo of its chatbot. The move so shocked Google that it rushed out a demo of its Bard AI weeks later. However, Google’s bot made a glaring mistake that was easy to spot in Google’s more restrained demo. While further analysis shows that Bing made its fair share of mistakes, Microsoft has been much faster in rolling out changes.
The new Bing was initially invite-only, but Microsoft has been opening access quickly. Today’s change means anyone who wants to talk to Bing can do so on the Bing site or via the Edge browser (which Microsoft would love for you to use). If you haven’t tried the new Bing since it launched, you might be surprised to see how many features it has since gained. As of today, Bing Chat has a persistent history of all your chats, image and video results, and plug-in support. That last one could be big.
Microsoft says it’s currently working with several partners to enhance Bing. For example, an upcoming integration with OpenTable will allow the chatbot to book reservations, and a Wolfram Alpha plug-in will enable Bing to generate visualizations based on your queries. Microsoft’s Build conference is happening in a few weeks, and we will most likely hear more about Bing integrations.
The internet is headed into unknown territory with Bing, Bard, and all the other chatbots that are sure to follow. For the first time, language models can digest vast parts of the internet and regurgitate the information on command. This could have profound effects on the information economy.
But there are still serious problems with these machines. A generative AI like the GPT-infused Bing doesn’t necessarily know what’s true; it only knows what it’s heard before. These machines will even justify falsehoods by inventing sources. No one knows how to stop these hallucinations yet. Even the “godfather” of AI, who recently left his job at Google, has expressed concerns about the dangers of AI. It’s a brave new world.
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