TECH CRUNCH
Microsoft is embarking on the next phase of Bing’s expansion. And — no surprise — it heavily revolves around AI.
At a preview event this week in New York City, Microsoft execs including Yusuf Mehdi, the CVP and consumer chief marketing officer, gave members of the press including this reporter a look at the range of features heading to Bing over the next few days, weeks and months.
They don’t so much reinvent the wheel as they build on what Microsoft has injected into the Bing experience over the past three months or so. Since launching Bing Chat, its AI-powered chatbot powered by OpenAI’s GPT-4 and DALL-E 2 models, Microsoft says that visitors to Bing — which has grown to exceed 100 million daily active users — have engaged in over half a billion chats and created over 200 million images.
Looking ahead, Bing will become more visual, thanks to more image- and graphic-centric answers in Bing Chat. It’ll also become more personalized, with capabilities that’ll allow users to export their Bing Chat histories and draw in content from third-party plugins (more on those later). And it’ll embrace multimodality, at least in the sense that Bing Chat will be able to answer questions within the context of images.
“I think it’s safe to say that we’re underway with the transformation of search,” Mehdi said in prepared remarks. “In our minds, we think that today will be the start of the next generation of this ‘search mission…
