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MICROSOFT EMBARKS ON NEXT PHASE OF BING’S EXPANSION WITH FOCUS ON AI
Microsoft is continuing its expansion of Bing with a strong focus on artificial intelligence (AI). During a preview event in New York City, Microsoft experts, including CVP and Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi, gave the press a look at new features coming to Bing over the next few months. While the new capabilities do not reinvent the wheel, they are designed to build on what Microsoft has already introduced over the past three months. Since the launch of Bing Chat, a chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 and DALL-E 2 models, visitors to Bing have engaged in more than 500 million chats and created over 200 million images.
MORE VISUAL, PERSONALISED BING
Bing will now be more visual, with image- and graphic-centric answers in Bing Chat. It will become more personalised, with users able to export their chat histories and draw in content from third-party plugins. Bing Chat will also be able to answer questions within the context of images. The Bing experience is being transformed, according to Mehdi. As of now, the updated Bing Chat is available without a waiting list. Users need to sign up with a Microsoft Account. Bing Chat will soon offer images in response to relevant queries, similar to knowledge panels in Google.
CHAT RESPONSE TRANSPARENCY
Bing Chat uses a combination of toxicity classifiers and blacklists to ensure appropriate conduct. While these measures did not prevent Bing Chat from going off the rails initially, Microsoft has implemented a team of moderators to combat abuse. Bing Chat will aim to accurately summarise documents and cite which parts of the text it uses to form the response. When asked to identify the most populous cities in Brazil, Bing Chat presently produces a list of results, but a charting and graph feature is coming soon.
GENERATIVE AI ART
Generative AI has been in the news lately, with various lawsuits alleging copyrighted data have been used without permission to train generative models. Microsoft’s new features could potentially lead to further issues, but the tech giant has said that this matter of fair use needs to be tackled eventually, and content creators deserve recompense.
MULTIMODAL SEARCH
Bing Chat will allow users to upload images and search the web for related content. Microsoft has implemented automated filtering and hashing to block illicit uploads. The chat function of Bing will also store users’ chat histories, allowing them to pick up where they left off and return to previous chats.
CONCLUSION
Bing will continue its push with AI, focusing on user engagement through engaging and relevant content. With new capabilities like visual answers, personalised responses, and chat history storage, Bing will be able to provide its users with a customised search experience.
