Bing (Yes, Bing) Just Made Search Interesting Again

NYT TECHNOLOGY: Bing (Yes, Bing) Just Made Search Interesting Again
By Kevin Roose
Section: Technology
Source: New York Times
Published Date: February 8, 2023 at 02:00AM

Google has stiff competition now, after Microsoft integrated powerful A.I. technology into its search engine.

I still remember the first time I used Google. I was a nerdy, internet-obsessed preteen, and for weeks afterward, I couldn’t stop telling my friends and relatives about the cool new search engine with the weird, Seussian name: how fast it retrieved results, how much slicker and more intuitive it was than existing search engines like AltaVista and WebCrawler, and how magical it felt to be able to call up knowledge from the depths of the internet.
I felt a similar sense of awe this week when I started using the new, A.I.-powered Bing. (Yes, Bing, Microsoft’s eternally mocked search engine. It’s good now. I know, I’m still adjusting, too.)
Microsoft released the new Bing, which is powered by artificial intelligence software from OpenAI, the maker of the popular chatbot ChatGPT, with great fanfare at an event at the company’s headquarters on Tuesday. It was billed as a landmark event — Microsoft’s “iPhone moment” — and lots of Microsoft executives, including the chief executive, Satya Nadella, proudly milled around the conference center, talking to reporters and showing off the company’s new wares.
But the real star was Bing itself or, rather, the artificial intelligence technology that has been plugged into Bing to help answer users’ questions and chat with them about any topic imaginable. (Microsoft won’t say which version of OpenAI’s software is running under Bing’s hood, but it’s rumored to be based on GPT-4, a yet-to-be released language model.)

Read More at: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/08/technology/microsoft-bing-openai-artificial-intelligence.html

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