When Microsoft and OpenAI announced their renewed partnership in January, the two companies also revealed that Bing search will soon boast AI-enhanced search capabilities. Little did we know at the time that Bing search had been powered for the past five weeks, not by the then-trendy GPT-3.5 model, but by its even more robust successor, GPT-4.
Microsoft envisions Bing, and in fact Google does the same with Bard, which serves as a pseudo-gatekeeper for information on the rest of the Web, not unlike AOL’s early America Online service. Instead of directing users to other sites where they can find the information and context they’re looking for on their own, these companies are looking to have generative AI systems (Bard and Bing) that automatically summarize and display that information without leaving the branded search page. Any additional relevant context that the user may have stumbled upon during their independent research will likewise be respected by the algorithm. Users can give GPT-4 a spin and experience our new, algorithmically dictated reality by signing up for the Bing Preview waiting list.