What is the new Bing with chat, and how does it work?

Yesterday, February 7, 2023, Microsoft held a press event at its headquarters in Redmond, Washington, and unveiled a new version of its Bing search engine and Edge web browser built around artificial intelligence. "AI will fundamentally change every software category, starting with the largest category of all – search," said Satya Nadella, Microsoft's CEO.

The headline feature is chat. Alongside the usual list of links, Bing can now hold a conversation, write a full answer by reading web pages for you, and show where that answer came from. Microsoft calls the new Bing and Edge "your copilot for the web." Some of it is live at Bing.com today, and full access comes through a waitlist.

What the new Bing does

Microsoft's announcement, written by its consumer marketing chief Yusuf Mehdi, describes four things the new Bing offers:

Better search. The familiar results page, with improved results for simple lookups like sports scores, stock prices and weather, plus a sidebar with fuller answers.
Complete answers. Bing reads results from across the web and summarizes them. Microsoft's example: how to replace eggs in a cake you are baking, without opening several pages.
Chat. For complex tasks, such as planning a detailed trip or choosing a TV, you can keep asking follow-up questions to refine the answer, with links to act on.
Writing help. Bing can draft an email, plan a five-day vacation in Hawaii, help you prepare for a job interview or make a trivia quiz.

Bing also lists its sources. TechCrunch notes that answers end with a "learn more" section linking to the pages used, and every result has a feedback option. The old link-based Bing stays in place for people who prefer it.

The Edge browser gets a new sidebar with two tools, chat and compose. You could ask it to summarize a long financial report on the page you are reading, compare it with a competitor's figures in a table, or draft a LinkedIn post and then change its tone and length.

How it works

Microsoft names four technical pieces behind the new Bing.

Piece	What it is, in plain terms
A next-generation OpenAI model	A large language model that Microsoft says is more powerful than ChatGPT, faster and more accurate, and customized for search
The Prometheus model	Microsoft's own system for working with the OpenAI model, aimed at more relevant, timely answers and better safety
AI in core ranking	The same AI applied to how Bing orders ordinary search results, which Microsoft calls its biggest jump in relevance in two decades
A new interface	Search, browsing and chat combined into one experience

A large language model is a program trained on vast amounts of text to predict the next word. On its own, such a model only knows what was in its training data. TechCrunch points out that ChatGPT's training data goes up to 2021, so it cannot tell you about recent events.

Prometheus is Microsoft's answer to that gap. In TechCrunch's description, Microsoft takes OpenAI's model and wraps Bing's own search technology around it. A simple way to picture it: the search engine is the research assistant who runs to the library and brings back today's pages, and the language model is the writer who reads them and drafts a clear answer with footnotes.

Microsoft says it worked with OpenAI on safeguards against harmful content, including misinformation and disinformation, and that the systems trained on its Azure cloud supercomputers are being tuned for Bing.

Why it matters

Microsoft describes the search engine and the browser as tools that billions of people rely on daily. It estimates that people make 10 billion searches a day and that about half go unanswered, because people now ask search engines to do things they were not designed for. If chat can handle those harder questions, the way people look for information could change.

It is also a competitive move. TechCrunch notes that Bing's global market share has stayed in the low single digits for 13 years. The announcement comes one day after Google unveiled Bard, its own chatbot, which so far is open only to trusted testers. And it follows Microsoft's January announcement of a multiyear, multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI.

TechCrunch also raises a question for publishers: if Bing writes the answer, fewer people may click through to the websites it draws on, which could reduce the advertising money those sites rely on.

Try it: Write one complex question you would normally need several searches to answer, such as "Plan a three-day trip to Montreal in winter for a family with two children, with indoor activities." Save it to try in the new Bing, and decide in advance which two facts you will check on the linked sources.

How can you try the new Bing, and what should you watch out for?

Go to Bing.com on a desktop computer. Microsoft says anyone can try a set of sample questions there today and join the waitlist for the full experience. It plans to expand the preview to millions of people in the coming weeks, with a mobile version in preview soon.

When you get access, use the citations. The value of a chat answer depends on the pages behind it, so click through for anything important: prices, dates, health or legal information. If two sources disagree, trust neither until you find a third.

Expect rough edges. This is a preview, and Microsoft says it needs real-world feedback to improve its models. Use the feedback buttons when an answer is wrong, keep personal information out of your questions, and treat Bing's answers the way you would treat a helpful but busy colleague's summary: a fast start, not the final word.