With these features, Microsoft wants to expand its AI tools

Microsoft continues to accelerate when it comes to artificial intelligence. A week ahead of arch-rival Google’s developer conference, the software company is announcing new AI features to its offering. In addition, Microsoft now allows all users to try out the Bing AI.

Microsoft will equip its Bing search engine and Edge browser with additional artificial intelligence (AI) functions. Microsoft manager Yusuf Mehdi announced this in a blog post on Thursday.

Until now, Microsoft has offered a text-based AI offering, i.e. a text search engine and chat robot. In the future, the AI ​​system will also provide visual search results on the Microsoft search portal Bing or in the Microsoft Edge browser.

When searching for the correct swing technique while skiing, users not only receive a text answer, but also a matching video.

In the case of knowledge questions such as the color of the planet Neptune, the text not only explains why certain components of Neptune’s atmosphere absorb the red light and thereby make the planet appear blue. The phenomenon is also explained visually with photos or videos.

Microsoft relies on GPT-4

The technology used by Microsoft is mainly based on the GPT-4 language model, which was only presented to a wider audience by the start-up OpenAI in mid-March. Closely tied to the small San Francisco company, Microsoft has invested some $13 billion in OpenAI, according to industry estimates.

Coinciding with the introduction of new AI features, Microsoft is now expanding accessibility capabilities. Previously, interested parties had to register on a waiting list to gain access to “the new Bing”.

In the future, all users will be able to try out Microsoft’s new AI offerings. However, the group continues to refer to the AI ​​software as “Preview” (preview program) to indicate that the system is still in early development and not yet mature.

Mehdi referred to the German news agency about the high usage since the premiere in early February. The Bing Image Creator now automatically creates more than 200 million images every day. “Overall, Bing has grown to over 100 million daily active users, and the number of daily installs of the Bing mobile app has quadrupled since launch.” However, Mehdi admitted that the starting point was low.

According to Mehdi, the AI ​​chat experience is being built into a platform for developers. This would make it possible, for example, to search Bing chat for a popular restaurant to dine at and make a reservation in a system such as OpenTable with one click.

(aeg/sda/awp/dpa)