Microsoft just gave its Bing search engine a powerful AI upgrade

Microsoft Bing Generative Search

In a world where Big Tech companies like Google, Apple and Meta are rapidly including AI into their products and services (Apple Intelligence, Google Gemini), Microsoft is also ramping up its efforts to include AI in its services (Azure AI, Microsoft CoPilot and CoPilot Pro). In the latest news, the Redmond-based tech giant has given its search engine Bing a powerful AI upgrade with Bing Generative Search.

Microsoft’s Bing Generative Search combines the power of generative AI and large language and small language models (LLMs and SLMs) with the search results page and is “currently shipping to a small percentage of user queries”, the tech giant said in a blog post.

Microsoft Bing Generative Search: How does the Bing AI upgrade work?

As per Microsoft, the Bing Generative Search is about creating a “bespoke and dynamic response to a user’s query”.

For example, if you search for "What is a spaghetti western?" on Microsoft’s Bing search engine, it “shows an AI-generated experience that dives into the film subgenre, including its history and origins, top examples and more”.

The AI-powered Bing Generative Search results will show on the left of the screen while the traditional Bing search engine results will show on the right. Microsoft’s goal is to retain the traditional search results and increase “the number of clickable links, like the references in the results”.

Microsoft claims that with the Bing Generative Search, users will get information that’s easy to read and comprehend, in addition to the related links and sources should they wish to investigate and find more information related to the query topic.  The Bing Generative Search will not affect the regular search results and they’ll “continue to be prominently displayed on the page like always”, said Microsoft in the blog post.

Microsoft says that it will slowly roll out the Bing Generative Search to the Bing search engine. The tech giant–co-founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen– added that its goal is to gather user feedback on the Bing Generative Search and further work on adding and refining Bing Generative Search. Only after it is satisfied with the testing process will Microsoft go for a broader rollout of the Bing Generative Search.

At the end of the blog post, Microsoft said it will share more Bing Generative Search updates over the coming months.