United States: Microsoft has announced that the company is updating its search products with more artificial intelligence, using the technology behind the wildly popular ChatGPT, as part of taking advantage of increasingly powerful AI tools.

Microsoft CEO Mr. Satya Nadella unveiled the latest version of Bing and an updated version of its Edge web browser at an event held at Microsoft’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters.

In the new Bing, users will see standard web links on the left and AI-powered answers on the right that are specifically modified to address the question.

Mr. Nadella remarked that “this is a new day in search. This is a new paradigm for search. Rapid innovation is coming. There’s a race starting today in terms of what you can expect. We’re going to move fast. Every day, we want to try new things. And most importantly, that’s a lot of what we want to do. It’s fun to innovate in search.”

According to Microsoft, search hasn’t changed much in the 20 years since companies started using algorithmic search engines. To that end, the company is adding generative AI to the equation, which it believes makes it more powerful than any of its rivals.

Mr. Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s consumer chief marketing officer, predicted that the Bing search engine would be powered by AI and run on a new, next-generation “large language model” that is more powerful than ChatGPT. A chatbot will help users refine their queries and provide more relevant and up-to-date results.

“I think this is the beginning of a very new era. This technology is going to reshape almost every software category,” OpenAI CEO Mr. Sam Altman observed during the event.

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