Microsoft held a press event on Tuesday, February 7, 2023, announcing new updates to its search engine Bing and Edge browser, powered by advanced AI technology. Bing, in particular, is getting a major overhaul that allows users to interact with the search engine and receive detailed answers to their search queries through conversation.

The new Bing is powered by the updated version of OpenAI’s GPT technology, called the “Prometheus Model.” Microsoft claims that this new AI language model is more powerful than the GPT 3.5 and better equipped to provide users with up-to-date information and annotated answers to their search queries.

The preview version of the new Bing will be available for desktop users starting Tuesday.

Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella, described the launch as a “new day in search,” stating that AI has the potential to deliver information more quickly and fluidly than traditional methods. The company demonstrated how the new Bing works in various configurations, including traditional search results with AI annotations and a chatbot interface, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

In the demos, Bing was able to provide answers to questions related to recipes, travel tips, shopping, and trip planning, among others.

In addition to the new Bing, Microsoft is launching two new AI-powered features for its Edge browser, “chat” and “compose.” The “chat” feature allows users to summarize a webpage or document and ask questions related to its contents, while “compose” acts as a writing assistant, helping users generate text from emails to social media posts based on starting prompts.

The launch of the new Bing and Edge browser comes amidst a growing interest in AI technology and text generation, following the launch of ChatGPT last November.

Microsoft has closely partnered with OpenAI and is looking to integrate this technology across its suite of office software for tasks like summarizing meetings and autocompleting lines of code.

The company’s biggest rival, Google, was caught off guard by the launch of ChatGPT and responded with its own conversational AI service, Bard, which is currently being tested by a small group of users.

However, the use of AI chatbots as a replacement for traditional search methods raises some questions. AI language systems like ChatGPT have been known to present false information, and there have been numerous examples of AI-generated errors since its launch on the web.

The rise of chatbots has brought new attention to this issue, but it remains to be seen how the technology will perform in the long run and how it will coexist with existing methods of finding information online.

Overall, Microsoft’s new Bing and Edge browser with AI enhancements promise to deliver a new and improved experience for browsing the web and finding information online.

Whether AI chatbots will live up to their full potential remains to be seen, but Microsoft is clearly investing heavily in this technology, and the company’s CEO has stated that they are “going to move and move fast.”