Microsoft debuts AI-powered summaries in Bing search engine

Microsoft Corp. today finally unveiled its response to Google LLC’s experimental AI-powered search experience, with the limited preview launch of a brand new feature called Bing Generative Search.

The corporate said the brand new feature combines the muse of Bing’s search results with the ability of enormous and small language models, generally known as LLMs and SLMs. In doing so, it will possibly understand the user’s search query and review tens of millions of sources of knowledge on the internet to offer quick summaries and useful information related to the subject in query.

In line with Microsoft, Bing Generative Search “dynamically matches content and generates search leads to a brand new, AI-generated layout to meet the intent of the user’s query more effectively.”

The launch was announced by Microsoft’s Head of Engineering and Product for Copilot and Bing, Jordi Ribas, who explained that it represents a “meaningful step forward” within the evolution of AI-driven search.

Bing Generative Search is a direct response to the AI Overviews feature in Google Search that was launched within the U.S. in May. Google said on the time that AI Overviews was all about providing quick answers for users who don’t have the time to read through dozens of articles to get the knowledge they need. It attempts to summarize the knowledge the user is in search of, sourcing what it deems to be essentially the most relevant insights from multiple web sites.

Microsoft’s offering does much the identical. In his blog post, Ribas offered a few examples of how it really works. As an example, if a user types “What’s a spaghetti western?”, Bing will surface information concerning the film genre’s history and origin, and highlight among the best-known movies in that category. It should also show an inventory of links and sources that it obtained the knowledge from.

Just as with Google’s AI Overviews, users can dismiss the generative AI responses and summaries entirely and as a substitute see a conventional results page.

Little question Microsoft has taken extra care to attempt to avoid among the controversy that followed the debut of Google’s AI Overviews, which made headlines for the entire improper reasons in the times after it got here online.

The brand new service was documented as generating a series of nonsensical, inaccurate and sometimes even potentially dangerous responses to user’s queries. In a single instance, AI Overviews told a user that asked the right way to prevent the cheese sliding off a homemade pizza to “mix non-toxic glue with the cheese.” In one other response, when someone asked about the very best approach to clean a washer, AI Overviews spat out a recipe for deadly mustard gas, together with instructions on the right way to go about making it.

Google isn’t the one AI search provider that has had facepalm moments, though. As an example, an alternate service called Arc Search made headlines for telling a news reporter with confidence that cut-off toes will eventually grow back, while Genspark happily really useful an inventory of weapons that could be used to kill someone effectively.

One other risk that Microsoft will wish to sidestep is the shortage of attribution, which befell a rival search engine called Perplexity. In line with Forbes, Perplexity plagiarized articles from sites resembling Bloomberg, CNBC and Forbes itself in a series of responses, without providing any credit or attribution links.

Microsoft can even wish to watch out to be certain that its recent search experience doesn’t put smaller web sites out of business. Certainly one of the large fears around generative AI search is that they could steal traffic from the web sites they obtain their information from. A study by Raptive Inc. earlier this yr revealed that Google’s AI Overviews feature could hurt about 25% of publisher’s traffic, due to the way in which its summaries eliminate the necessity for users to click through to the actual source articles.

Ribas insisted that won’t be the case with Bing Generative Search, saying the corporate is looking closely at how generative AI search affects website traffic. He insisted the brand new experience has been able to take care of the variety of clicks to web sites. Nevertheless, he didn’t provide any statistics or studies to back up his claims, as a substitute citing “early data” that the corporate hasn’t yet published.

Image: Microsoft