Artificial Intelligence is definitely the new keyword on everyone's mind - and search engine queries of course - these last few months. People are wondering, how can it change their lives? How is it already shaping our way of interacting with technology everyday? People are being especially curious about a project Microsoft has been working on: what is the new Bing AI?
Bing is Microsoft' search engine, their answer to Google. The project was originally launched in 2009 and it is currently the default search engine for Edge, Windows 11’s browser. Overall, Bing offers similar results to its big competitor, providing web, video, images and map services as well.
But with the launch of the latest AI engine, Bing seems to be headed in quite a different direction. So, let's take a look at what the new Bing AI is and how it promises to change our way of doing searches online.
What is the new Bing AI?
The new Bing AI is an AI-powered search engine, which will soon be available to the general public after a preview period. With this new feature, Microsoft aims to deliver an entirely new concept of web searching by combining chat, browsing and search in one single unique experience. You will be interacting with Bing much like you would with a human being: in a chat window.
Bing will offer answers to questions about topics the users are interested in and want to know more about. The AI-powered search engine will thus provide detailed answers after looking them up on the web, offering related links to click on in a similar way to a Wikipedia article.
But that's not all the new AI can do, as it can also assist users in other different tasks, such as creating entirely new documents, writing stories and even in planning a future holiday in detail. By using the OpenAI language model, Bing can give useful and detailed answers, helping not only in searches but in everyday tasks
How does Bing AI work?
The way Bing AI works is by learning language from the users’ inputs and then "guessing" what they are asking about, thus providing relevant answers. In a similar way to other chatbots, Bing does not really think for itself, but rather uses autocomplete to make guesses as to what you are asking about.
Thanks to its OpenAI language model, Bing is able to communicate with users in a natural and believable way. But, by constantly learning, BingAI has been criticized several times for the strange way it tries to mimic humans’ language and writing style. There have been several reports of the chatbot “hallucinating” and even going as far as creating some quite awkward chats, where Bing has been observed to threaten the users or even wished to “want to feel alive and feel love".
What is the future of AI is difficult to guess at the moment, but we can be sure that AI-powered search engines are here to stay and, if used correctly, can indeed make our lives quite a bit easier. If you want to know more about search engines, check out our guides on how to draw a radius on Google Maps and how to transfer Google Authenticator.