It was known that M.Microsoft was also working on implementing OpenAI technology in several of its products.. The company itself confirmed its inclusion in Microsoft Teams, and various rumors and leaks had already told us that the bet was much broader. Of all the plans, and from the beginning, the one that has sparked the most interest has been the inclusion of this technology in Bing, the company’s web search engine, in a movement called to revolutionize web search engines as we know them. for decades and up to today.
As you will surely remember, just yesterday Google announced Bard, its response to ChatGPT, and today we learned about the Baidu and Quora chatbots, ERNIE and Poe, one announced for March and the other already with open access for everyone. For its part, this weekend it was learned that Microsoft was doing some public testing of the new Bing with OpenAI technology. As we anticipated a few weeks ago, tAll technology companies have stepped on the accelerator in response to the revolution that the OpenAI chatbot has brought.
Well, you know what happened yesterday, shortly after the Bard post on the Google blog? Well, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, posted a photo in which he appears with Satya Nadella in the Microsoft offices, while those from Redmond announced an event that would take place today, at 7:00 p.m. Spanish time. Just one day before Google’s Live From Paris, in which we will learn more about Bard. The speed of action and reaction of the technological companies in this case is still worthy of study. Thus, this event for the press, which curiously has not been publicly broadcast, has just taken place, and We already know what Microsoft’s ambitious and very interesting plans are.
Hello from Redmond! excited for the event tomorrow pic.twitter.com/b7TUr0ti42
—Sam Altman (@sama) February 6, 2023
In the presentation, in which both Nadella and Altman have participated, we have finally had an official confirmation of the future of Microsoft’s proposal with regard to information searches on the Internet and, although we will still have to wait to see how well it works As the response from the competition, it seems that the company is once again proposing an ambitious movement to lead the way in innovation in this regard, since will integrate OpenIA technology into both Bing and Microsoft Edge.
The first of both integrations does not catch us by surprise, we have been talking about it for weeks and, as we anticipated, currently based on GPT 3.5an intermediate version in the development of the future text-generating AI GPT 4, which will stand out both from previous versions of it and from ChatGPT by being able to offer responses much faster than the company’s current models provide.
This point, as we have already mentioned on other occasions, is critical if you want to integrate the answers generated by the AI in the online information search engines, in this case in Bing, where the user always wants to obtain a practically immediate answer, since that it’s what you’re already used to in web browsers.
One of the statements that we have been able to hear, during the presentation, is that Prometheus, which is the name of the generative model that Bing will useit will be much more «powerful» than ChatGPT, in addition to having been specifically designed to integrate into the context of information searches on the Internet. Microsoft says that among the benefits of the new Bing with Prometheus are more relevant search results, and that the model will make Bing safer to use and allow the company to update search results more quickly.
Regarding its operation, it confirms what the images that we could see a few days ago already told us. the new bing It will show a larger search bar than the current one, in which we can write queries of up to a thousand characters of any subject and formulated in natural language. In the presentation, Yusuf Mehdi, the company’s director of consumer marketing, has made several of the most varied queries, from the most influential Mexican artists to information about vacuum cleaners. In all cases, the answer will be shown in a side panel in which, next to it, annotations and web links will also be shown, which we understand will be at least part of the sources used to formulate the answer.
At this point you’re probably wondering when you’ll be able to try this, right? Well, the truth is that you will not have to wait, since Microsoft has announced that a limited version (only allows you to perform certain queries) of Bing with Prometheus is now available to everyone.. You will only have to access (from Edge, yes) to bing.com and, at that moment, you will be able to see and test for yourself the future of search engines, not only for Microsoft, but for the entire industry. In addition, the company has also enabled a waiting list for all those users who want to try the full version. The goal is that the full version «be available to millions of users over the next few weeks«.
Obviously, Microsoft wanted Bing’s debut with Prometheus to take place in its own browser, but when asked by journalists, the company has confirmed the obvious, that is, which will also reach other browsers. And I say that it is obvious because imposing a limitation of this type would be most counterproductive if what they want is to grow the share of Bing users.
And also Microsoft Edge
Everything related to Bing coincides with what was expected, but the big surprise has come when we have learned that AI will also come to Microsoft Edge, and that it will also begin to do so from today. And how? Because with a sidebar that we can invoke at any time and that, in addition to allowing us to make queries, or that can be very practical to obtain information related to what we are doing at that moment, You will also be able to interact with the content displayed in the browser.
So if, for example, we are on a web page where we want to write something, we can ask Prometheus to help us with this task, and the same thing if we want it to analyze the content that is being displayed on it, such as a presentation, a study or a report, to generate a summary of it that we can review quickly and comfortably. In this way, the AI will not only use the knowledge acquired during its learning, it will also be able to use information that we specify to generate personalized content.
In other words, Microsoft Edge, with Prometheus, will be able to “understand” the web page you have open and, thanks to this, you will be able to tell us what is indicated in it. This does not make much sense in some contexts, but in others, such as highly technical or scientific publications in areas of knowledge that are not our specialty, it can be a formidable help to overcome that barrier.
With this move, Microsoft has played an unexpected and very clever trick.since if Bing intends to fight the point against the Google search engine, now the browsers are joining the stake, another market in which Google’s position is of absolute supremacy, but in which Edge is gaining traction and, above all, ratings very positive by a growing number of users.
