Microsoft recently announced expanding the scope of use for their new Bing search engine based on their ChatGPT AI. The company plans to integrate the new Bing into mobile devices and Skype.
Although Microsoft has been relatively low-key about the new technology behind the Bing AI search engine, called Prometheus — Jordi Ribas, the head of engineering for the Microsoft Bing team, recently shared some interesting details about it.
Ribas explained that it all started in the summer of 2022 when OpenAI shared its next-generation GPT model with Microsoft. The new model was far more powerful than the previous GPT-3.5 model used in ChatGPT, with greatly improved synthesis, summarization, chat, creation, and more abilities.
One of the challenges with large-scale language models like GPT is that they are trained on data at a specific point in time, which means they cannot handle new information. Ribas and his team developed a proprietary technology called Prometheus that combines Bing’s indexing, ranking, and answering results with the GPT model’s inference capabilities.
Microsoft Prometheus generates a set of internal queries through a component called the Bing Orchestrator to provide accurate and rich answers to user queries within the context of a given conversation.
Ribas explains that this method of providing accurate answers from the AI via the Bing Orchestrator is called grounding. Thanks to Bing’s grounding technology, Prometheus can even integrate quotes into the text of chat answers, allowing users to click through to sources and review information. Microsoft aims to direct traffic to these sources to promote a healthy web ecosystem.
While grounding is a great innovation, Ribas acknowledges that it’s a new technology that must be applied responsibly to reduce inaccurate information and prevent offensive and harmful content. The Bing team is collecting user feedback to improve Prometheus further.
The new Bing search engine combines search and chats into a single interface, which users can switch between by clicking UX elements or scrolling/swiping up and down. Microsoft hopes the new version will save people time while making searching more enjoyable.
Overall, the new Bing search engine with Prometheus technology promises to provide more accurate and comprehensive search results with the ability to integrate chat-based conversations into the search process. With continued user feedback and improvements, the new Bing has the potential to be a powerful tool for users.
