AI-Powered Bing Is Now Open to All

Microsoft announced that the new Bing and Edge are now available to all Microsoft users in a public preview, removing the waitlist.

Microsoft also provided details on upcoming features, including the enhanced transparency of responses. When Bing summarizes documents or pages, it will clearly highlight its sources of information.

Microsoft also responded to user requests to allow users to access previous chats and continue to dig into a specific subject, as well as save and export chat history. Users will also be able to move their chat to the Edge sidebar, keeping it available while they browse.

Bing Image Creator, which is currently only available in English, will add more than 100 languages in the upcoming weeks.

Microsoft Edge will also unveil a sleeker design and the possibility to include third-party plugins. Microsoft is currently working with OpenTable to facilitate restaurant reservations and Wolfram Alpha to help answer complex math and science questions.

Microsoft launched AI-powered versions of Bing and Edge in a limited preview 90 days ago. A chat function powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 allowed Bing users to search the internet using conversational language. In March, Bing added Image Creator, powered by OpenAI’s DALL-E2, to its features list.

During the limited preview, users created over 500 million chats and over 200 million graphics. Since then, Bing has grown significantly, with over 100 million daily active users, and it continues to gain in search market share. Edge is also gaining in browser market share.

Safety remains a core concern when using generative AI. In a press event last week, Sarah Bird, the head of responsible AI at Microsoft, responded by saying that Bing Chat “benefits from the filtering and moderation already in place with Bing search,” and it uses “a combination of AI models trained to detect potentially harmful prompts, and blacklists to keep the chat relatively clean.”

In response to the call to halt large scale AI experiments, Yusuf Mehdi, VP at Microsoft overseeing its AI initiatives, told reporters that “the only way to really build this technology well is to do it out in the open in the public so we can have conversations about it.”