A new and improved ChatGPT is here: Microsoft is officially launching an upgraded version of the popular chatbot on the Bing search engine and the Edge browser today as a limited preview.
Microsoft says it enhanced ChatGPT to be even better at summarizing content, offering recommendations, and finding answers to complex questions for the most current topics.
According to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, the program goes beyond search by essentially acting as a “co-pilot” for your everyday needs. Rather than forcing you to scroll through search results, the new Bing promises to find the answer instantly through intelligently crafted lists, bullet point articles, and summaries.
"It’s a new day in search, it's a new paradigm in search, rapid innovation is going to come," he told journalists during a Tuesday briefing.
The company demoed the new AI-powered Bing at Microsoft's offices in Redmond. One big change is how the program is designed to constantly crawl the web to help you find the most up-to-date answers, unlike ChatGPT, which is limited to knowledge up to 2021.
The other difference is how it’ll cite its sources, detailing how it arrived at the answers by posting web links to the third-party websites and news articles it pulled from. Here’s what it could pull off:
Use Bing to create a five-day travel itinerary. It searches the web for the best sights and compiles them together in a list. You can then ask Bing to alter the itinerary to a three-day trip and it’ll quickly adapt.
The new Bing can also offer you the pros and cons to buying a certain product, like a vacuum, in an easy-to-read bullet-point format. In the same vein, it can offer recommendations on the best product models to buy.
On Edge, the AI-powered Bing can be opened to summarize the key points to a long PDF, like a financial earnings report. It can also translate computer code into another language, making it a useful programming tool.
On Edge, Bing can also write entire emails or social media posts for you. Simply describe the article you’re writing and click to determine the article’s length, format, and tone. In seconds, Bing will generate the post for you.
The new Bing writing an email for user through the prompt.
The integration can supply the answers a little faster than OpenAI’s existing ChatGPT service, which can slow down or cut off access during times of high user demand. That said, while Microsoft is offering the preview of the new Bing to all desktop users, the preview will only be able to handle a limited number of queries. A waitlist will be opened for interested users to try the full experience on all browsers, although Microsoft says the best experience will be on Edge.
ChatGPT is already available as a free program on the OpenAI website. But the new Bing integration promises to make the AI even more widely available to the public. For now, though, the company is maintaining the original Bing search result format. The ChatGPT-powered results will appear in a separate column on the right side. A new tab labeled "Chat" can also be opened to access the full chat box experience.
Microsoft held its event a day after Google announced its own rival chatbot called Bard, which promises to have similar capabilities. The search giant is currently testing Bard with a small group of testers, but plans on rolling it out broadly in the coming weeks. The company is slated to hold its own event tomorrow at 8:30 a.m. EST, where it may divulge more details.