The new AI-powered Bing, which has been enhanced with OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology, has generated a great deal of buzz and excitement in the tech community.
Microsoft has been a minor player in the search engine market for over a decade, but the new Bing might finally be the hit the company has been waiting for. In just 48 hours after its announcement, over a million people signed up for the waitlist to try out the new Bing, a figure that has left Microsoft officials feeling humbled and energized.
Microsoft corporate vice president and consumer chief marketing officer, Yusuf Mehdi, took to Twitter to express his excitement about the strong interest in the new Bing, tweeting, “We’re humbled and energized by the number of people who want to test-drive the new AI-powered Bing!
In 48 hours, more than 1 million people have joined the waitlist for our preview. If you would like to join, go to http://bing.com/new!”.
Microsoft chief, Satya Nadella, also announced the new Bing, which is currently available only in limited preview to some users. Everyone else needs to sign up to the waitlist, which involves signing into a Microsoft Account.
If you don’t have one, you’ll need to create one. A Microsoft account can be created by signing into an Office app or Outlook, but not many people would have ever signed into Bing, which is currently used by about 3% of the world’s search engine users. According to Statcounter GlobalStats, 92% of search users use Google.
Once you’ve signed into Bing, you’ll be able to access the new chat box on the page, but trying to use it will redirect you to a notice indicating that you need access to the new Bing.
If you sign up from Chrome, the Bing website will prompt you to install Edge. If you’re looking to cut the wait to access the new Bing, you can install the Bing Extension for either Chrome or another browser, such as Safari.
ChatGPT has quickly become one of the most popular apps of all time, gaining 100 million users in just two months. The growing waitlist for the new Bing suggests that the buzz around ChatGPT is delivering rare positive results for Microsoft Bing, even though most people are signing up to try the ChatGPT feature, rather than Bing search itself.
In 2011, former Microsoft chief, Steve Ballmer, explained why he remained so optimistic about Bing despite its financial losses. He said,
“If you go to a search engine today and you say, ‘Print my boarding pass on Southwest,’ you’ll get nothing back but chaos. The truth of the matter is, computers, search engines, nothing really understands verbs today. We only understand nouns. And yet, most of us as human beings want to command these systems to do something for us.”
Steve Balmer
Ballmer’s vision for Bing was that it would eventually be a tool that could understand and respond to users’ commands and requests. With the addition of ChatGPT technology, it appears that Microsoft is finally starting to realize Ballmer’s vision for Bing.
