REDMOND, Wash. — Microsoft unveiled new versions of its Bing search engine and Edge web browser that take advantage of next-generation OpenAI artificial intelligence models in a move that promises to increase competition with longtime rival Google.
“It’s a new day for search,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at an event Tuesday hosted at the company’s headquarters. “A race starts today in terms of what you can expect.”
The “new Bing,” as Microsoft describes it, is available in limited preview starting today. Microsoft announced what it describes as four technical breakthroughs underpinning a new AI-powered search experience:
- Bing is now running on a new next-generation OpenAI large language model, more powerful than the ChatGPT chatbot and designed for search.
- A new “Prometheus Model” lets Bing improve relevancy, annotate answers, give more recent results, understand geolocation, and improve safety.
- There are improvements in the core search ranking engine, with AI creating the largest jump in relevancy in years, according to the company.
- The user experience combines search with AI, chat, and other capabilities.
Microsoft ran through a series of potential use cases with the new search experience in response to prompts:
- Asking Bing to estimate whether a new loveseat can fit in a specific model of a car.
- Asking Bing for tips on egg substitutes.
- Asking Bing to produce a travel itinerary — and asking it to translate it in more than 100 languages.
- Asking Bing to create a meal plan for a family with different dietary restrictions and preferences.
- Asking Bing to create trivia games.
New features in Edge include the ability to open a sidebar that uses AI to draft text, such as a LinkedIn post, within the specified parameters of the users, including the tone of voice to be used.
“Our intention is to bring it to all browsers; we’re starting with Edge,” said Microsoft executive Yusuf Mehdi, asked by a reporter if Microsoft will offer the new experience for Chrome and other browsers.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives on Tuesday called Microsoft’s announcement the “first shot across the bow in this Big Tech AI battle.”
Microsoft has been trying to make its mark in the search business since the late 1990s, when it launched MSN Search, initially powered by third-party technologies. That evolved into Windows Live Search, relaunched as Bing in 2009.
The rise of AI may give Microsoft a new chance to challenge Google’s search dominance.
Despite its longevity in search, Microsoft has struggled to make its mark against the search giant. Google remains the dominant industry player, with more than 90% worldwide market share, by some measures, compared with low-single digits for Bing, the second-largest player in the global search market.
However, Microsoft has quietly built a major advertising business in the process, based on Bing and related online properties. Search and news advertising topped $12 billion in revenue for Microsoft in the past 12 months.
Still, that’s just about 5% of Microsoft’s overall revenue, driven significantly in recent years by growth in the cloud. That gives Microsoft the potential to take bigger risks in search without directly undermining its overall business.
Google is in a different position, still relying heavily on its flagship search engine to power its business. Revenue from Google Search and related services topping $162 billion in 2022, more than 57% of Google parent Alphabet’s revenue.
In advance of the Microsoft-OpenAI event, Google on Monday announced the upcoming rollout of an “experimental” conversational AI service, dubbed Bard. The company also plans to soon roll out new AI search tools and features, said Sundar Pichai, the Google and Alphabet CEO, in a post announcing the news.
Google’s announcement came after months of OpenAI stealing headlines and capturing buzz with its ChatGPT service, and several weeks of speculation about Microsoft’s integration of OpenAI technologies.
Microsoft’s news attracted global coverage on Tuesday. It’s shifting attention temporarily, at least, from the wave of layoffs in the tech industry in recent months, including 10,000 job cuts announced by Microsoft on Jan. 18.
The news Tuesday follows the Jan. 23 announcement of an additional investment by Microsoft in OpenAI, described by Microsoft as “a multiyear, multibillion dollar” designed to accelerate AI breakthroughs and releases.
The emergence of ChatGPT has sparked widespread attention in recent weeks, illustrating the benefits and risks of generative artificial intelligence. The technology gives sophisticated answers and responses to complex and at-times esoteric user prompts, although its accuracy has also come into question in some situations.
Microsoft in recent weeks has accelerated the pace of AI integrations into its products, many of them powered by OpenAI’s GPT natural language processing technology.
- The company made its Azure OpenAI Service generally available on Jan. 17, and said it would soon add ChatGPT to the service.
- On Feb. 1, Microsoft Teams announced an “intelligent recap” in its premium version that will generate notes from meetings, recommend follow-up items, and provide highlights that are personalized to different people.
- New AI capabilities in Microsoft Viva Sales, announced Feb. 2, uses the Azure OpenAI Service and GPT to suggest email content for salespeople in common scenarios they encounter.
Existing integrations of OpenAI technology in Microsoft products include the GitHub Copilot feature, which gives software developers a virtual AI pair programmer to suggest code and functions as they create apps and services.
S. “Soma” Somasegar, managing director at Madrona Venture Group and a former head of Microsoft’s Developer Division, said Tuesday’s announcement is “clearly part of a longer-term plan.”
“I believe that Microsoft is singularly focused on integrating this kind of technology deeply into the business and information worker applications that already have billions of users,” he said.
Speaking two weeks ago at the World Economic Forum, Nadella cited the rise of AI as an example of the acceleration of innovation. Whereas the internet took some 30 years to reach large parts of the world, and cloud and mobile technologies took 15 years, “now I think we’re talking months” in terms of the broad rollout of AI technologies, he said.
For OpenAI, one of the key benefits of the partnership is access to Microsoft’s technology infrastructure, including the immense computing resources required to train massive artificial intelligence models.
This, in turn, has become a selling point for Microsoft in multiple ways, providing access to Open AI’s technology and a high-profile example of its cloud prowess in its competition with Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud.
OpenAI said in the Jan. 23 announcement of its extended Microsoft partnership that Azure’s “unique architecture design has been crucial in delivering best-in-class performance and scale for our AI training and inference workloads.”
