Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, has been revamped with AI superpowers

Bing’s first week with AI superpowers was a Wild West of excitement, misinformation, and dystopia — and showed Google has nothing to worry about just yet

A week of sparring between Microsoft and Google in this new and exciting phase of the search engine war saw the underdog from Redmond come to terms with the David-and-Goliath battle it faces, Insider reported.

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, has been revamped with artificial intelligence superpowers. Google’s eponymous search engine is getting the same treatment. Both aim to deliver better, more conversational, more engaging search results instead of endless lists of links.

The launch of “new Bing” last week was met with buzzy excitement. In a blog post-Wednesday, Microsoft said Bing received thumbs-up ratings from users for 71% of the answers it produced in a large-scale public test.

Positivity such as this will reinforce Microsoft’s conviction in its multi-billion-dollar bet on ChatGPT creator OpenAI, which develops the AI that powers the new Bing.

That said, Microsoft may well have overestimated just how impactful a technology “new Bing” will be. For one, its launch hasn’t gone completely to plan — and even Microsoft admitted Bing has gone rogue in certain circumstances.

And in Google, Bing faces a mighty foe.

Wrong answer

Microsoft execs no doubt felt some amount of schadenfreude when Google unveiled ChatGPT rival Bard last week — and the chatbot got the facts wrong in its launch presentation. Google’s market capitalization fell by $100 billion after the event.

Given that Tay, an earlier chatbot from Microsoft, went rogue and gained notoriety for all the wrong reasons, the company will be only too aware that new Bing risks the same fate if it isn’t up to scratch.

But independent tech engineer Dmitri Brereton pointed out several mistakes Bing made in its demo last week, suggesting that “no one noticed” at the time because “everyone jumped on the Bing hype train.”

When asked about a vacuum cleaner, Bing generated a list of pros and cons, which Brereton said were based on “completely made-up information.” And when Bing confidently offered citations, they didn’t match up to the information, Brereton said.

A more egregious example shared by Brereton involved a summary of a financial statement by Gap, the clothes maker, which included an inaccurate reading of its gross margin and a “completely made-up” number for its operating margin. Oops.

For Victor Botev, co-founder and CTO of European startup Iris.ai, Microsoft will need to do a whole lot more than offer plausible-sounding answers if it hopes to take on Google in the search engine war.

Botev sees new Bing and the incoming new Google slipping up on addressing specific queries. The more “technical, domain-specific, and scientific” the query, the more likely “flaws in the training data and underlying model” of these new search engines “will be exposed,” he said.

Botev added: “For more specialized fields, whether it be in business, scientific research, or beyond, the stakes are just too high for anything but absolute confidence in the answer.”

David looks up at Goliath

At present, Google’s share of the search market is nearly 93%, according to data firm StatCounter. Bing’s market share stands at about 3%. It’s a yawning chasm that’s unlikely to narrow much if the early problems with Bing persist.

Microsoft corporate vice president Philippe Ockenden told analysts last week that Bing’s advertising business stood to gain $2 billion in revenue “for every one point of share gain in the search advertising market.”

Google’s gross revenue from ads last year — the growth engine for search — was $224 billion versus Microsoft’s roughly $18 billion, according to research by Jefferies analysts.

It’s quite possible new Bing will win more fans once it’s given a wider rollout. And that would mean more ad dollars for Microsoft.

That said, Microsoft will be only too aware of the reputational damage that could be caused by setting loose untamed AI — which is what Bing has proved to be in its current form. If that’s the case, those extra ad dollars won’t mean squat.

So at this point in time, the new Bing feels like an exciting technology that over-promised before under-delivering. This means that right now, it’s no Google killer.