Microsoft unveiled the “age of AI” on Tuesday, with conversational ChatGPT features for Bing described as the “AI-powered copilot for the web.”

Satya Nadella, Microsoft’s chief executive, likened AI and the launch of ChatGPT to the opening of the Web. “It was the Mosaic moment,” Nadella said. “…I think this technology will reshape pretty much every software category. The question is, how is AI going to reshape the Web?”

“All computer interaction will be mediated with an agent helping them,” Nadella claims. And he said it will begin with search.

Microsoft executives said search has remained fundamentally the same as twenty years ago. It works well for factual queries, but stumbles when asked to make recommendations. Microsoft plans to have a new Bing search and Bing browser use chat technology to answer questions posed by users. Corporate vice president Yusuf Mehdi said that Bing will incorporate a powerful new GPT model called Prometheus.

Mark Hachman / IDG

Bing’s home page will now accommodate 1,000-character entries, and list both a traditional list of search results as well as an AI-powered conversational list of results down the right-hand column of the page. Microsoft will also implement a chat experience, where it will provide a list of recommendations or responses within a chat interface, too. Mehdi showed the chat model working for television recommendations, a travel itinerary, and a 90s trivial game.

“The new Bing is live today in limited preview,” Mehdi said, and will expand to “millions of people in the coming weeks.”

Microsoft has also implemented mitigation layers that will add filters, parsing queries to identify and defend against queries that will be may be potentially harmful, such as a potential attack on a real-world location.

Mark Hachman / IDG

AI chat is also being implemented inside a new version of the Microsoft Edge browser as a sidebar experience. Chat can summarize an earnings report, Mehdi said, as well as author a LinkedIn post.

Mark Hachman / IDG

Microsoft had been widely expected to announce a sweeping AI initiative, covering both its consumer and enterprise products. In January, The Information reported that an AI-powered Bing could be released as early as March, with ChatGPT or a related technology powering Office, too. This was shortly before Microsoft invested an undisclosed amount of money into OpenAI, though reportedly the figure totals $10 billion over a ten-year period. Microsoft had already invested $1 billion into OpenAI before that.

Chief executive Satya Nadella had previously told investors that Microsoft planned to lead in the “age of AI,” and deploy GPT technology across its product line. Leaks of what Microsoft referred to as “the new Bing” appeared to in the wild for a short time earlier this month. It offered basic citations to indicate where it had sourced its information.

Microsoft’s Bing will now compete against ChatGPT, the conversational AI that took the world by storm last year, and by Google’s newly announced Bard, which has been released in a limited form to testers. You.com has also released a conversational AI, YouChat, which also can provide contextual answers and links to its sources, and integrates AI-generated art as well.

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