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Microsoft’s new Bing chatbot is fun but sometimes more cautious than ChatGPT

Microsoft has given a small group of people early access to the new version of its Bing search engine boosted with artificial intelligence courtesy of startup OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT.

CNBC has spent some time testing it. The new Bing can at times be more helpful, or at least more entertaining, than the usual blue links in search results. And it’s similar to ChatGPT in that it provides a lot more information than you might expect from a traditional search.

If Microsoft manages to get more people to use Bing, it could make the company even more profitable than it already is. For every percentage point that Microsoft gains in search advertising, it will pick up $2 billion in new revenue, Phil Ockenden, finance chief for the company’s Windows, devices and search divisions, said on a Tuesday conference call with analysts. “This is the largest software category that exists, and it’s incredibly profitable, incredibly large and still growing,” Amy Hood, Microsoft’s chief financial officer, said on the call.

So far, the new Bing feels like it’s been supercharged, and at the very least, people might want to try it out to see if it satisfies them more than traditional search engines that billions of people have come to know in the past 25 years.

You can chat with the new Bing

After you search on Bing, you can challenge the results rather than clicking on a few URLs or typing out a new query. To compare, I asked the current version of Bing to identify the largest software category, to which it said the answer is “enterprise software” with a citation to Statista. The new version provides similar information at the top of the search results page, but below that, you’ll find a text box in which you can type a message and kick off a chat. You might ask, “Really?” And Bing will respond with more information attempting to validate its previous answer.That gets into the question of accuracy. You might ask the AI-boosted search engine if the response is wrong, for example. And the new chat feature will say that “one could argue that search advertising is the largest software category in the world by revenue,” and hedges by noting there are many ways to evaluate different kinds of software. That’s not what we’re used to seeing when we go to a search engine. It’s downright entertaining.

Recovered

Augmented reality headset enables users to see hidden objects

MIT researchers have built an augmented reality headset that gives the wearer X-ray vision.

The headset combines computer vision and wireless perception to automatically locate a specific item that is hidden from view, perhaps inside a box or under a pile, and then guide the user to retrieve it.

The system utilizes radio frequency (RF) signals, which can pass through common materials like cardboard boxes, plastic containers, or wooden dividers, to find hidden items that have been labeled with RFID tags, which reflect signals sent by an RF antenna.

The headset directs the wearer as they walk through a room toward the location of the item, which shows up as a transparent sphere in the augmented reality (AR) interface. Once the item is in the user’s hand, the headset, called X-AR, verifies that they have picked up the correct object.

When the researchers tested X-AR in a warehouse-like environment, the headset could localize hidden items to within 9.8 centimeters, on average. And it verified that users picked up the correct item with 96 percent accuracy.

X-AR could aid e-commerce warehouse workers in quickly finding items on cluttered shelves or buried in boxes, or by identifying the exact item for an order when many similar objects are in the same bin. It could also be used in a manufacturing facility to help technicians locate the correct parts to assemble a product.

“Our whole goal with this project was to build an augmented reality system that allows you to see things that are invisible — things that are in boxes or around corners — and in doing so, it can guide you toward them and truly allow you to see the physical world in ways that were not possible before,” says Fadel Adib, who is an associate professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, the director of the Signal Kinetics group in the Media Lab, and the senior author of a paper on X-AR.

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How Bing AI Search Uses Website Content

The way Microsoft uses website content and AI in Bing Search is a win for publishers and users

There are two sides of this, the front end and the back end.

On the front end, Bing is blending links to website sources within a relevant contextual output. That’s a win for publishers because that has the potential for a better search referral without the ambiguity of the traditional ten blue links.

The back end features the Bing Orchestrator, which uses the web data contained in the Bing index to ground the GPT part, improving relevance of the output, which is also a win for publishers.

 

Microsoft Prometheus Model

Microsoft has previously described the Prometheus AI Model, a collection of techniques for interacting with the OpenAI model.

The latest blog post provides new details about what the new Bing search with AI is.

What first stands out is that OpenAI shared their next generation version of GPT with Microsoft in the summer of 2022.

This next generation model features “creative reasoning capabilities” that are more powerful than GPT-3.5, the technology underpinning ChatGPT.

 
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Sci-fi magazine overwhelmed by hundreds of AI-generated stories

Clarkesworld, a science fiction magazine, has banned new story submissions after receiving hundreds of low-quality AI-generated pieces

Science fiction magazine Clarkesworld has halted story submissions after receiving a growing deluge of AI-generated pieces. The magazine’s founding editor, Neil Clarke, says the problem has been created by people promoting surprisingly capable AI language models such as ChatGPT as a way to earn money from fiction publishing – despite the poor quality of the AI stories.

“The machine-written submissions we’ve received are far from publishable quality,” he says. “I’m sure there are some that are less detectable, but the majority we’ve received have been easy for me to identify.”

Clarke says that he has talked to other magazine editors who currently have the same problem, although he says they have been reluctant to speak to the press – as he was, until the problem grew to unsustainable levels.

 

The magazine normally has an open submission policy to encourage new writers, but took the decision to close submissions on 20 February after receiving 50 AI-generated story submissions that day. At that point, Clarkesworld had received 700 legitimate submissions since the start of the month and 500 machine-generated ones, with the rate of increase meaning that AI-generated stories would soon take over.