Microsoft has unveiled Bing’s OpenAI-enabled capabilities, previously available as a limited preview. The extended preview comes just days after the company rolled out new pricing for his Bing APIs, raising licensing fees for developers who want to use Bing’s services in their systems.
Open preview means you don’t have to join the waiting list to test Bing Chat powered by OpenAI technology.
The company aims to anchor artificial intelligence (AI) in Bing, moving from text-only searches to providing search results that embed image and video answers.
Microsoft has also integrated Bing Image Creator into the Bing Chat experience. According to the company, this makes it the only search experience that can generate both text and visual content in one place.
Integration with third-party information providers is another part of Microsoft’s plans to build Bing. Bing is about to replace Google as the top internet search provider. Yusuf Mehdi, Chief Marketing Officer for Consumers at Microsoft, wrote:
As an example, we use the Bing and OpenTable integration to help users find and book reservations. Microsoft is also working with Wolfram|Alpha to enable people to create visualizations and find answers to complex scientific, math, and human-curated database questions directly from Bing Chat. bottom.
“We are working with our partners at OpenAI to make this opportunity accessible to developers and as consistent as possible,” said Mehdi. “We believe these types of skills are a game changer in reinventing search and will drive developer opportunities in search.”
However, Microsoft is believed to have significantly increased the costs incurred by using the Bing API products (Search, Images, News, Videos, Visuals, Entities, Spell Check, and Auto Suggest). There is a limited free tier, but the lowest priced S1 tier is $25 per 1,000 transactions.
According to Colin Hayhurst, CEO of non-tracking search engine Mojeek, interest in the use of search in chatbots and machine learning applications is driving renewed interest in search data.
“By raising the price of their APIs to this degree, Microsoft has decided to take the fight to Google by reshaping the search duopoly,” he said. “In the past Microsoft was happy to challenge Google through its Bing API partners such as DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and Yahoo!. Now these companies are being exploited for profit.”
Brave, an independent internet search provider, has decided to stop using the Bing API. In his blog post, the company explained the reasoning behind the decision to migrate as “uncertainty over the future of Bing APIs”, which he said grew after his OpenAI partnership with Microsoft.
Microsoft recently announced an unprecedented API price hike, so we were concerned about the continuity of the Bing service. “This has put undue pressure on search engines that rely partially or fully on the Bing Search API. The consequences of relying on Bing will show up in the months following the expiration of long-term contracts.”
According to Bloomberg, Microsoft threatens to block search data if search providers using the Bing API use Bing’s search results to train their own AI chat systems.
