Microsoft’s Bing hits 100 million energetic customers due to AI chat, Edge browser

Microsoft’s Bing has by no means been in any hazard of overtaking Google because the Web’s hottest search engine. However the headline-grabbing AI-powered options from the “new Bing” preview that the corporate launched final month appear to be serving to—Microsoft said today that Bing had handed the 100 million each day energetic customers mark.

“We’re absolutely conscious we stay a small, low, single digit share participant,” writes Microsoft’s Yusuf Mehdi, driving residence simply how small Microsoft’s share of the search market is in comparison with Google’s. “That mentioned, it feels good to be on the dance!”

Google would not present each day energetic consumer numbers for its search engine, however StatCounter data means that its market share sometimes hovers slightly below 90 p.c within the US, in comparison with 6 or 7 p.c for Bing.

Microsoft says that there are “tens of millions of energetic customers” making an attempt out the AI-powered Bing preview and that roughly a 3rd of these are individuals who weren’t utilizing the service earlier than. The corporate additionally credit the slow-but-steady progress of Microsoft Edge, which makes use of Bing as its default search engine and can repeatedly immediate you to change again to Bing as your default search engine for those who swap to one thing else.

Microsoft launched the Bing chatbot a month in the past in a “restricted preview,” utilizing a big language mannequin (LLM) from OpenAI. The corporate has made a number of modifications to the bot’s habits in response to its generally bizarre and threatening conversations. One change restricted the variety of responses the chatbot might give in a single occasion, because it was simpler for the bot to go off the rails throughout prolonged classes; extra lately, Microsoft launched some “personalities” for the bot to make solutions both extra simple or extra entertaining.

Since final month, Microsoft has added “new Bing” options to its Edge browser, Skype, the Home windows 11 taskbar, and a few of its developer instruments. The corporate can be testing “multimodal AI” know-how that may course of a number of types of enter, together with photographs, textual content, audio, and video.