Microsoft Installs the Shopping tools to Compete with Google.

 More on the shopping aspects/tools being provided.  In Techcrunch.

Microsoft brings new AI-powered shopping tools to Bing and Edge

Frederic Lardinois@fredericl / 11:00 AM EDT•June 29, 2023

People walk past a Microsoft store entrance with the company's logo on top in midtown Manhattan

Microsoft today announced a slew of new AI-powered shopping tools for its new Bing search engine and the Bing AI chatbot in the Edge sidebar. While a lot of the shopping features that Microsoft built into Edge over the years aren’t exactly fan favorites, this new set of tools actually looks useful.

Microsoft will now, for example, use Bing’s GPT-powered AI capabilities to automatically generate buying guides when you use a query like “college supplies.” It will automatically aggregate products in each category it comes up with, list their specs so you can compare similar items and, of course, tell you where to buy them (with Microsoft getting an affiliate fee when you buy).

Given that there is an entire ecosystem of sites that focus on these kinds of buying guides, it will be interesting to see how they will react to this change (and if Microsoft is doing this in Bing, Google and others will surely follow suit). Nobody is going to bemoan the end of the low-quality, SEO-optimized shopping content you often find when you try to compare different products, but this has the potential to hurt legitimate editorial operations, too

The new buying guides in Bing are now available in the U.S. and the worldwide rollout for buying guides in Edge is starting today.

Microsoft brings new AI-powered shopping tools to Bing and Edge.

Oh, Oh,  are we shopping now?  Was this allowed?  Will Google play nice?

Microsoft brings new AI-powered shopping tools to Bing and Edge  in TechCrunch

Frederic Lardinois@fredericl / 11:00 AM EDT•June 29, 2023

People walk past a Microsoft store entrance with the company's logo on top in midtown Manhattan

Microsoft today announced a slew of new AI-powered shopping tools for its new Bing search engine and the Bing AI chatbot in the Edge sidebar. While a lot of the shopping features that Microsoft built into Edge over the years aren’t exactly fan favorites, this new set of tools actually looks useful.

Microsoft will now, for example, use Bing’s GPT-powered AI capabilities to automatically generate buying guides when you use a query like “college supplies.” It will automatically aggregate products in each category it comes up with, list their specs so you can compare similar items and, of course, tell you where to buy them (with Microsoft getting an affiliate fee when you buy).

Given that there is an entire ecosystem of sites that focus on these kinds of buying guides, it will be interesting to see how they will react to this change (and if Microsoft is doing this in Bing, Google and others will surely follow suit). Nobody is going to bemoan the end of the low-quality, SEO-optimized shopping content you often find when you try to compare different products, but this has the potential to hurt legitimate editorial operations, too. ... ' 

Bing Using Chatbit Bing to Answer Questions

ChatGPT Using Bing to Answer Questions

ERIC HAL SCHWARTZ on May 23, 2023 at 1:00 pm

ChatGPT will start sourcing answers using Bing, Microsoft announced at its Build conference. OpenAI’s explosively popular generative AI chatbot will make Bing its default search source, with real-time answers compiled into ChatGPT’s answers.

“Foundational to our progress with the new Bing is our fantastic partnership with OpenAI,” Microsoft corporate vice president Yusuf Mehdi explained in a blog post announcing the plan. “ChatGPT will now have a world-class search engine built-in to provide timelier and more up-to-date answers with access from the web. Now, ChatGPT answers can be grounded by search and web data and include citations so you can learn more—all directly from within chat. The new experience is rolling out to ChatGPT Plus subscribers starting today and will be available to free users soon by simply enabling a plugin which brings Bing to ChatGPT. ”

This is a breaking story. We will update this article with more information after the Microsoft BUILD presentations today.  ... ' 

MS Bing and AI

Used this,  fairly good,   where will it go?  Often annoyed with MS Windows. No stopping, it seems. 

MICROSOFT/TECH/ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

Microsoft’s Bing Chat AI is now open to everyone, with plug-ins coming soon in The Verge.

All you need is a Microsoft account to get access to the GPT-4-powered version of Bing.

By Tom Warren, May 4, 2023, 3:00 AM EDT|0 Comments / 0 New

Share this story, Bing logo

Microsoft is making its Bing GPT-4 chatbot available to everyone today, no more waitlist necessary. All you need to do is sign in to the new Bing or Edge with your Microsoft account, and you’ll now access the open preview version that’s powered by GPT-4. Microsoft is also massively upgrading Bing Chat with lots of new features and even plug-in support.

This open preview launch comes nearly two months after Microsoft experimented with removing the waitlist for its new Bing Chat feature. The chatbot originally launched in a private preview in February, and Microsoft has been gradually opening it up ever since.

Chat history in Bing Chat.

Chat history in Bing Chat. Image: Microsoft

Microsoft is now adding more smart features to Bing Chat, including image and video results, new Bing and Edge Actions feature, persistent chat and history, and plug-in support. The plug-in support will be the key addition for developers and for the future of Bing Chat.

Microsoft is working with OpenTable to enable its plug-in for completing restaurant bookings within Bing Chat and WolframAlpha for generating visualizations. Microsoft will share a lot more at its Build conference later this month, where we should get a better look at how developers will really extend this chatbot like OpenAI did with ChatGPT in March.  ... ' 

Musk's 'TruthGBT' being talked

 Much talk about thisnow, but what will it mean?

Elon Musk's 'TruthGPT' is coming, but will it be any different from other chatbots?

By Muskaan Saxena  in TechRadar

Elon Musk has shared more details about his rumoured and much anticipated ChatGPT rival, an AI platform he now says will be called TruthGPT.

Musk’s platform is designed to take on Microsoft’s Bing AI and Google’s Bard, and Musk’s announcement comes shortly after he signed an open letter urging AI labs like OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT, to slow down development due to what he said were “profound risks” to wider society posed by the increasingly capable AI engines.

In an April 17 interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox News,, Musk explained that he is “going to start something which I call Truth GPT or a maximum truth-seeking AI that tries to understand the nature of the universe”. He added that TruthGPT “might be the best path to safety, in the sense that an AI that cares about understanding the universe, [is] unlikely to annihilate humans because we are an interesting part of the universe.”

We recently wrote about Musk’s plans to develop a ChatGPT alternative following his huge purchase of GPUs, noting that despite Musk’s supposed anxieties about AIs that the general public can access, he planned to launch his own.

In addition to acquiring new hardware, Twitter has been hiring engineers to manage the project. Musk has been openly seeking talent in the AI industry to try and compete with Open AI, and has recruited engineers from DeepMind, the AI research arm of Google’s parent company Alphabet. It’s also emerged that the tech mogul has created an artificial intelligence company called X.AI, based in Nevada. ... '

Google Devising Radical Search Changes to Beat Back A.I. Rivals

Been thinking about the interaction of Google and the changing AI world.   I can see how they may lose if basic search is better served by chat oriented methods.   I see myself now going beyond simple search because I can get more up front. 

Google Devising Radical Search Changes to Beat Back A.I. Rivals    By The New York Times, April 17, 2023

Google has been worried about A.I.-powered competitors since OpenAI demonstrated a chatbot called ChatGPT in November.

Modernizing its search engine has become an obsession at Google, and the planned changes could put new AI technology in phones and homes all over the world.

Google's employees were shocked when they learned in March that the South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung was considering replacing Google with Microsoft's Bing as the default search engine on its devices.

For years, Bing had been a search engine also-ran. But it became a lot more interesting to industry insiders when it recently added new artificial intelligence technology.

Google's reaction to the Samsung threat was "panic," according to internal messages reviewed by The New York Times. An estimated $3 billion in annual revenue was at stake with the Samsung contract. An additional $20 billion is tied to a similar Apple contract that will be up for renewal this year.

A.I. competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google's search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also upgrading the existing one with A.I. features, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.

From The New York Times

View Full Article  

Bing Chat Gets Improved

Evolution occurring in this space.  Have used it and does seem better. 

Bing Chat is already one of the fastest and more reliable AI chat tools available, and Microsoft just made it more powerful with several significant upgrades.   

in Digital Trends  By Alan Truly

Possibly the most valuable changes have to do with Bing Chat’s memory, allowing longer conversations. Previously, Microsoft limited how long you could chat with Bing before a fresh start was required to prevent a frightening AI meltdown. That has been extended, but Microsoft’s blog post didn’t share particular details.

Bing Chat itself told me there was no fixed limit to the length of our chat. The chat box still showed a 2,000-character limit in my testing, but I could paste a link and ask Bing to read it.

Bing Chat now seems to have no limit on chat length.

For example, I gave Bing Chat a link to a lengthy Wikipedia entry about the U.S. Constitution, and it was able to quickly summarize the contents. I asked Bing Chat about the length of the Wiki page, and it said it was about 17,000 words.

Microsoft also claimed performance has improved, particularly in the Edge sidebar, but I noticed no significant changes. Bing Chat has always felt fast, considering some of the tasks it’s presented with. The summary of a 17,000-word entry took about 15 seconds.

You can create images in the Edge sidebar with Bing Chat,

Other upgrades to Bing Chat include the ability to generate images in the sidebar and continue conversations after closing it or navigating to a new page. I asked Bing Chat for a charcoal drawing of a quokka, closed the sidebar, and opened a new tab with an image search. Then I tested its memory by instructing, “now do it as a super sharp color photo with bokeh lights in the background.”

Bing Chat quickly responded in the sidebar with four, adorable critters in front of charming bokeh-rich lights. The accuracy was spot-on, as seen in the image search.

Bing Chat continues to improve. Google is trying to catch up with its own AI release called Bard. So far, OpenAI and Microsoft are still leading the way with refined GPT-4 technology. ... '

Bing’s AI chatbot is now on your Android phone’s keyboard

 Was an early user of Bings AI Chatbot, relatively good,  now yet more accessible. 

Bing’s AI chatbot is now on your Android phone’s keyboard  — here’s how to get it

By Peter Hunt Szpytek, April 6, 2023

Chatbots have become extraordinarily popular for those looking for help with their writing — or simply mess around with them and have fun. Now, Android users have access to one such chatbot straight from their keyboard. Bing Chat is Microsoft’s chatbot that rivals the likes of ChatGPT and Google Bard, and it has been added as a feature to the SwiftKey keyboard, a predictive keyboard that helps with texting.

While Bing Chat can help users compose the body of a message, it can also analyze prewritten text for your tone to suggest changes if the user wants to avoid coming across a certain way. Bing Chat has already been providing those services via the Bing app and through web browsers; however, the new integration with the SwiftKey keyboard allows users to easily access the chatbot for help whenever their keyboard is enabled.   ... ' 

Microsoft to Ruin Chat Search?

Ouch if this is the case. 

ChatGPT Opened a New Era in Search. Microsoft Could Ruin It

By Wired, March 31, 2023

Microsoft in February announced its standard fees for search data would increase by as much as 10 times starting in May.

Google typically gets the blame for the lack of competition in web search. The US government is even suing to block the company from using allegedly monopolistic tactics, like making itself the default search engine in widely used software such as Android, Chrome, and Safari.

But some upstart search engines trying to woo users with privacy protections or ad-free searches say their latest challenge doesn't come from Google. Instead, it's Microsoft and its Bing search engine causing their aggravation.

Search startups have long relied on licensing search results from Bing, tapping a web indexing operation larger than a small company could easily afford and adding their own features and ways of parsing queries. But Microsoft's rollout of a Bing search chatbot based on technology underlying OpenAI's ChatGPT has prompted concerns that Microsoft is unfairly squeezing out its search data customers as it launches a renewed attempt to bite off more market share from Google.

From Wired

View Full Article  

Microsoft Having Issues with its AI

Not unexpected, but it looks bad, 

Microsoft Has No Idea How Stupid to Make Its AI

By Futurism, February 23, 2023

Microsoft said in a statement, "The goal is to give you more control on the type of chat behavior to best meet your needs."

It's only been a few days since Microsoft announced that it was majorly restricting its unhinged Bing artificial intelligence chatbot — but apparently, the tech giant is already having major second thoughts about its decision.

In a statement issued yesterday, Microsoft seemed to reverse course on its previous announcement that it was seriously restricting the AI's abilities by putting caps on the number and length of responses, noting that many users seemed to want the "long and intricate chat sessions" with the bot codenamed "Sydney" back.

"The first step we are taking is we have increased the chat turns per session to six and expanded to 60 total chats per day," the statement reads. "Our data shows that for the vast majority of you this will enable your natural daily use of Bing."

Microsoft added that it plans to "go further" and "increase the daily cap to 100 total chats soon" — a bizarre change of heart given that until a few days ago, there was no limit at all.

From Futurism

View Full Article          

Intro to Microsoft Bing AI Chat

Microsoft's take no AI Chat.  Have not used Bing Chat yet, but interesting in having modes of use, some game features.  Uses ChatGPT and adds interesting features.  Has apparently had some odd results.  In development, with all the rush of getting these ideas out?

Bing Chat is a fickle creature in BleepingComputer,    By Lawrence Abrams

While playing with Bing Chat this week, the chatbot sometimes shared data that it usually wouldn't, depending on how I asked a question.

Strangely, these conversations had no rhyme or reason, with Bing Chat providing more detailed information in one session but not in another.

For example, today, when trying to learn what data is collected by Bing Chat and how it's saved, after multiple requests, it finally showed a sample of the JSON data collected in a session.

When asked how to change this data, Bing did something strange — it put me in a new mode where I could use special commands that start with the # symbol.

"You can change some of this data by using commands or settings. For example, you can change your language by typing #language and choosing from the options. You can also change your chat mode by typing #mode and choosing from the options." - Bing Chat

Further querying of Bing Chat produced a list of commands that I could use in this new mode I was suddenly in:

Digging into this further, it appears that Bing Chat had somehow put me into a sort of 'debug' mode that let me use a #mode command to test experimental chat modes that Microsoft is working on, as listed below:

Assistant mode: In this mode, I can act as a personal assistant for the user, and help them with tasks such as booking flights, sending emails, setting reminders, etc.

Friend mode: In this mode, I can act as a friend for the user, and chat with them about their interests, hobbies, feelings, etc.

Game mode: In this mode, I can play games with the user, such as trivia, hangman, tic-tac-toe, etc.

Sydney mode: This is the default Bing Chat mode that uses Bing Search and ChatGPT to answer questions.

In a later session, when I no longer had access, Bing Chat told me these modes were only supposed to be accessible to Microsoft Employees when debug or developer modes were enabled.  ... ' 

Bing Chat Vulnerable to Attacks

 Implications unclear, but Bing Chat appears not to be unstable under attacks.  Still just in preview, but needs work.

Microsoft's ChatGPT-Powered Bing Reveals Its Codename and Rules, Argues With Users

By ZDNET, February 15, 2023

Users with access to Bing Chat have over the past week demonstrated that it is vulnerable to so-called 'prompt injection' attacks.

Microsoft's new ChatGPT-powered Bing Chat is still in a limited preview, but those with access have already prompted it to reveal its codename, the rules governing its responses -- and apparently witnessed it denying that it was vulnerable to a method that caused it to reveal its codename in the first place.

Users with access to Bing Chat have over the past week demonstrated that it is vulnerable to so-called 'prompt injection' attacks. As Ars Technica's AI reporter Benj Edwards explains, prompt injection attacks allow the user to bypass previous instructions in a language model prompt and substitute it with a new one. Edwards detailed the attack in an earlier story. 

Bing Chat has even claimed that reports about its vulnerability to prompt injection attacks are incorrect, and argued with testers over minor details of history telling one journalist "You are only making yourself look foolish and stubborn."

From ZDNET

View Full Article  

Microsoft Plans to Bring Ads to AI

 Lets get it right first.

Microsoft is reportedly already planning to bring ads to Bing's AI chatbot   

It's early days, but Microsoft is figuring out how to monetize the tool.

Kris Holt|@krisholt|February 17, 2023  in Engadget.

Microsoft is reportedly in talks with advertising agencies on how to slot ads into the juiced-up Bing, particularly when it comes to the generative AI-powered chatbot. The company is already testing ads there, according to Reuters, including by slotting in traditional search ads.

The ad agency talks are still said to be in the early stages. Only a small number of users have access to the chatbot, and millions more are on the waitlist. As such, Microsoft may not feel like there's a rush to incorporate ads right away.

Microsoft reportedly anticipates that the chatbot's more conversational approach to delivering information will bring in more users and, in turn, advertisers. Ads in the chatbot might also be featured more prominently than conventional search ads. One place where you might see ads is in the links that the chatbot uses for citations in its responses. Microsoft told Reuters that it will work with partners and advertisers as it starts exploring the potential of the tech for ads.    ... ' 

The New AI Planned to be Delivered by Microsoft

Impressive look at the direction to enhance all search with an intelligent Co-Pilot.

AI  Powered Bing and MS Edge  

Intro talk:   https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOeRWRJ16yY 

Reinventing search with a new AI-powered Microsoft Bing and Edge, your copilot for the web. Today, we launched an all new, AI-powered Bing search engine and Edge browser, available in preview now, to deliver better search, more complete answers, a new chat experience and the ability to generate content. We think of these tools as an AI copilot for the web.  ... 

To learn more visit: https://www.bing.com/new?form=MW00XV&...

But note this is in early stages, still makes mistakes, Microsoft has not won. 

I am on the waitlist ... 

AI Powered Microsoft Bing

 Tking a deeper look,  Need to quantify the comparison. 

ACM NEWS

Microsoft Unveils AI-Powered Bing, a New Challenge to Google Search

By CNet, February 7, 2023, by Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

"All computer interaction is going to be mediated with an agent helping," said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Microsoft on Tuesday unveiled a new version of its Bing search engine that adds the technology behind ChatGPT technology, an AI system for conversational and creative responses that marks the first big chance in years to get ahead of search king Google.

Bing now is an "AI-powered co-pilot for the web," Microsoft said, delivering search results infused with information from the large language model from Microsoft partner OpenAI. Bing also gets a new chat window that Microsoft said will help deliver shopping lists, travel advice, shopping advice and trivia games. And the technology also is built into Microsoft's Edge browser, able to perform tasks like summarizing PDFs and generating LinkedIn posts.

"All computer interaction is going to be mediated with an agent helping," Chief Executive Satya Nadella said at a launch event at the company's headquarters in Redmond, Wash. "We're going to have this notion of a co-pilot that's going to be there across every application."

From CNet

View Full Article    

Microsoft Plans to Add ChatGPT to Bing

 Can ChatGPT be successfully be integrated into services like search engines?  Implications?  Will public uses be useful, dangerous? 

Microsoft Plans to Add ChatGPT to Bing Search Engine: Report

By Eric HAL Schwartz on January 4, 2023   in Voicebot.ai

Microsoft will incorporate ChatGPT into its Bing search engine, according to a report from The Information. The OpenAI synthetic media chatbot will serve to answer questions directly instead of the traditional link list and could debut as soon as the end of March in an attempt to come out ahead of Google’s far more widely used search engine.

BING CHATGPT

Bing has always run far behind Google as a search engine, even as a term for searching online. ChatGPT’s recent explosive popularity could change that equation. Microsoft’s $1 billion investment into OpenAI includes an exclusive claim to enterprise applications like a ChatGPT-based search engine so it would have an edge over Google. The idea seems to be an alternative version of Bing where users could converse with ChatGPT and get direct answers, including on recent developments, with sources cited and hyperlinked. The currently available version of ChatGPT explicitly states it is trained only on data as recent as a year ago. Microsoft had been supposedly working on a chatbot for Bing as long ago as 2021, but this appears to be a different product entirely.

Microsoft has already begun incorporating other OpenAI tools into Bing. The tech giant began making the DALL-E text-to-image service part of Microsoft 365 through the new Designer app and the upcoming Image Creator tool for both Bing and Edge. Google has plenty of large language model projects of its own in the works through Deepmind, but hasn’t made anything like ChatGPT available to the public.

CHATBOT SEARCH

Microsoft would also not be the first on the scene with a ChatGPT-style search engine, although certainly the largest and first with ChatGPT actually backing it. You.com recently launched the YouChat search engine, capable of sourcing current events through generative AI. You.com is smaller than Bing, let alone Google, but it does demonstrate there’s at least some interest in a search engine with a conversational format. ChatGPT was already seeing potential rivals in GPT-3-derived chatbots, such as Jasper Chat, a chatbot format for Jasper’s own generative AI engine. Google may face some real competition in the search sector for the first time in a very long time if Bing and others experimenting with this approach take off.  ...

Microsoft and the Internet of Things

How will the IOT effect the operating systems of the past?  Simplifying because parts of the OS can be in the cloud?  Or making them much more complex?  How will search engines be integrated? Microsoft wants to be heavily involved:

Microsoft Sees Its Next Big Thing In The Internet Of Things
Microsoft thinks it's staked out a claim to one of the next big technological shifts, and it's not being particularly subtle about it. ....  But the company's news that it is opening up its Bing search engine to developers is a major clue that Microsoft thinks it's onto something big. In short, Microsoft is staking out a major claim on the nascent Internet of Things, the term for an interconnected web of devices that will bring much more data and device control to users. If, that is, it ever works. .... "

(Update) Related, RRW posts on: Whats holding up the Internet of Things?