I was a nerdy, internet-obsessed preteen, and for weeks afterward I couldn’t stop gushing to my friends and family about the cool new search engine with the strange, Seussian name. I would describe how quickly it returned results, how much slicker and more user-friendly it was than competing search engines like AltaVista and WebCrawler, and how magical it felt to be able to access knowledge from the depths of the internet.
(Yes, Bing, the much derided search engine from Microsoft. I know; I’m still getting used to it.)
At a celebration held at the firm’s headquarters on Tuesday, Microsoft unveiled the new Bing, which is driven by artificial intelligence software from OpenAI, the company behind the well-known chatbot ChatGPT. Many Microsoft employees, including its CEO, Satya Nadella, enthusiastically walked around the conference center, speaking to reporters and showcasing the company’s new products. It was described as a historic event — Microsoft’s “iPhone moment.”
The true star, though, was Bing itself, or more precisely the artificial intelligence system that was integrated into Bing to assist in answering queries and chatting with consumers about every topic conceivable. (Microsoft won’t reveal which version of OpenAI’s software is powering Bing, although it’s thought to be based on GPT-4, a language model that hasn’t yet been made available.)