AI to Make You Actually Care About Bing

It isn't just ChatGPT on the Bing website. Microsoft blends OpenAI's language technology with its own Bing search engine.

Microsoft Bing faces a big problem: Google utterly eclipses it as a search engine. But Bing has a chance to grab more attention for itself with the OpenAI's language technology, the artificial intelligence foundation that's made the ChatGPT service a huge hit. 

For the brainier Bing to work, though, Microsoft has to get the details right. ChatGPT can be useful, but it can be flaky, too, and nobody wants a search engine they can't trust.

Microsoft has put a lot of thought and its own programming resources into the challenge. It's wrestled with issues like how AI-powered Bing shows ads, reveals its data sources, and grounds the AI technology in reality so you get trustworthy results, not the digital hallucinations that can be hard to spot in machine-generated information.

I spoke to Jordi Ribas, leader of Bing search and AI, to dig more deeply into the overhauled Bing search engine. He's a big enough fan that he used the technology to help him write his boss a memo about it. "It probably saved me two to three hours," he said, and it improved the Spanish executive's English, too.

When the technology expands beyond today's very small test group, it'll let millions of us dig for much more complicated information, like whether an Ikea loveseat will fit into your car. And we'll all be able to see whether it truly gives Google a run for its money. But for now, are seven aspects of Bing AI that I learned.