Microsoft announced the new version of Bing on February 7 with the next generation model used in ChatGPT. The deployment will be staggered, but we already have access to this new version on Xataka and were able to verify it’s working. What is so special? Is it different from what we saw in ChatGPT? And above all: is this a search engine revolution and a real threat to Google? Let’s see him.

Combining “old” with “new”

The new Bing does not renounce the virtues of search engines that have been with us for the past two decades. In fact, two panels are displayed when you ask something. The first is traditional. The results, as always, appear inside with a list of links and a brief description.

The second is the response to your right, showing a ChatGPT-generated response in chat format, along with a much more accurate response to much more specific requests like “write four paragraphs about the new Bing” or “tell me what”. the third law of thermodynamics”. The type of responses are similar to what we’ve seen ChatGPT can give us… but they differ in two important parts.

Bing shows you the sources of information in your answers

As you can see in the picture, the right panel with the chat clearly shows the answer it offers, but here is the first big difference with ChatGPT: In Bing, the conversation engine shows various sources of information for us to use if we want. to investigate any of the links made available to us.

The sources it takes to answer this data are diverse and depend on the relevance of results found in searches, but what’s interesting is the naturalness and security of linking all these sources together to create a response that seems coherent. As the people responsible for Microsoft warn, the new “Bing with ChatGPT” is not infallible, so it’s worth reviewing the answers to verify that what’s stated is indeed correct.

And fully up-to-date

Another big advantage with ChatGPT is that the new Bing with OpenAI speech engine provides access to completely up-to-date information. ChatGPT is limited to a dataset dating back to 2021, and you’ll get errors if you ask about recent topics. With Bing, that doesn’t happen.

In fact, by asking questions about the latest national or international current events, Bing can, as always, seek relevant resources to show a clear and seemingly coherent answer that usually fully meets our needs.

But be careful, you might screw up

As we’ve said, you have to be careful not to take the answers too literally, something that both those responsible for OpenAI with ChatGPT and Microsoft warned all along when they announced the new search engine. With ChatGPT, Bing makes mistakes, as a simple search to ask how LaLiga Santander is doing shows.

Pay attention to what the speech engine is saying. No matter how madridist or athletic you are this answer is not correct and the actual classification is the one shown in that box taken from the traditional Bing search engine.

As can be seen in the picture, the classification that the speech engine showed was significantly different from the actual classification, which, for example, appeared correct in the traditional Bing.com search engine.

Bing wants us to use the speech engine independently

When using the Bing.com search engine, answers don’t always appear in two separate panels, and not all of our requests are handled that way. In fact, in our tests, giving the response “command” to try to invoke those conversational responses worked better than “ask” Bing.

Thus, asking the search engine “What are the advantages of the new Bing over Google search?” when typed, only links were returned, but the “tell the new Bing advantages over Google search” brought up the conversation panel on the right.

Other times, even that doesn’t work and Bing insists on showing only old searches; this is something we assume will change over time. However, ChatGPT’s speech response can be enabled through an access that appears on the left side of the search results, welcoming us to the new Bing, and invites us with a button for the user to “Ask anything”.

On the search engine page, the “Chat” option appears at the top, where as a result we can access the conversation part without the search part, with the list of links.

Here we find an experience similar to that of ChatGPT, but with these differences mentioned above, both in terms of availability of resources and timeliness of information.

In fact, if we ask something while on the search engine, wanting both the list of links and the conversation panel, Bing may give us the option to respond to that request in that second panel, but it may “redirect” us to the conversation chat without further part. At the bottom right of this panel, the “Let’s Chat” button is always shown with a blue background color to distinguish it from other accesses.

Microsoft Edge gains many integers with CoPilot

As interesting as the new Bing, and maybe even more interesting, is the new version of Microsoft Edge announced today. It can be downloaded from the browser development channel.

In it, in addition to minor changes to the interface, this integration of the new Bing appears with an icon in the upper right that, when clicked, shows a conversation panel.

The interesting thing is not that we can search directly there using this technology, but that these searches can “attack” the web we visit. If I’m looking at a laptop that interests me on Amazon, for example, on the right panel, I can ask Bing to show me a list of similarly priced options.

You can even create a comparison table between the models it recommends, but on the right panel this table will be somewhat limited due to its width. We can go a little further by copying that chart (the option appears on the three ellipses of each answer card) and clicking on the “Compose” section at the top of the right panel.

From there, a tool appears that allows us to copy and email this information, but we are also given the ability to write paragraphs, blog entry or a list of ideas based on our request. The table continues to go a bit wrong because it can’t be formatted more advanced and is limited to text, but still the option is really eye-catching.

First impressions: This is the beginning of something potentially huge.

A few hours with the new Bing makes it clear that the effects across the board can be huge. Not only for users who have a very powerful tool to work and play in front of them, but also for an entire industry that has been far from revolutions for over two decades.

With the new Bing model comes results that can certainly give the search business an important return: clicking on the links suggested by the speech engine isn’t all that necessary here (or they’re just thrown into the background like footnotes from a book).

There’s more. Both Microsoft and Google face the consequences of reusing content from others in a way that ultimately makes those search engines (in most cases) good enough.

With Google, which has been presenting many search results without even leaving the search engine for years, this is what many people criticize because the answer it gave us was already what we were looking for.

It will also be interesting to see if Microsoft will increase the share of both its browser and search engine with this launch. The interest is certainly significant, as evidenced by the fact that Bing is already among the top downloads for iPhone.

Hateful comparisons: Bing 1 – Google 0

Comparisons between the new Bing, ChatGPT, and Google’s offerings with Bard will be inevitable. We wanted to do a very quick query: the controversial query promoted by Google in the ad. In it, the engine from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) was asked about any remarkable discoveries it could tell a nine-year-old boy.

Google Bard added erroneous information to his answer, stating that JWST had taken the first photo of a planet outside our solar system (an exoplanet), but the information was wrong: this photo was taken by the VLT in 2004. Same question on Bing, the answer was correct: JWST confirmed the previous image of that first exoplanet, but did not discover it. Bing 1 – Google 0.

In this montage, we compare the answer on the right, where Google Bard made a mistake, with Bing’s answer, which is correct. Here Microsoft’s AI model (for now) surpasses Google’s.

The impact of this new technology is huge for anyone dedicated to creating and producing content. We’ve seen this in the image generator AIs and Getty’s recent lawsuit against the creators of Stable Diffusion, and we’ve also seen it on GitHub and its CoPilot; scale.

It’s still too early to make any firm decisions, and it’s clear that both ChatGPT and this new Bing or future Google Bard – we’ll see what it has to offer and how it eventually offers – has a lot to say. However, a few hours is all it takes to confirm that it really looks like an outage.