Microsoft has also lifted the veil on the new artificial intelligence behind search engine Prometheus after announcing that Bing has made some changes to its ChatGPT-based chatbot.
Microsoft recently announced that there are restrictions on Bing’s chatbot. The company also shared some new information about how the Bing search engine works. Microsoft has officially named the technology behind the new Bing Prometheus.
Unique: Microsoft Prometheus
In its blog post, Microsoft announced Prometheus, the first artificial intelligence model of its kind that combines Bing indexing, ranking and results with OpenAI’s most advanced GPT model. When it comes to Prometheus, Microsoft also emphasizes that it’s a “proprietary technology.”
Prometheus leverages the power of Bing and ChatGPT to iteratively generate a series of internal queries through a component called Bing Orchestrator. Aiming to provide an accurate and comprehensive response to the user’s query in the context of the specific conversation, Prometheus achieves all of this in just a few milliseconds. The response created by Prometheus is what Microsoft calls a chat response.
New grounding technique
Models like ChatGPT represent a breakthrough in Large Language Models (LLM), but like other LLMs, OpenAI has trained its own model with datasets over a period of time. Therefore, these systems are unaware of current information.
Microsoft Prometheus closes this gap. Prometheus acts as a bridge between the search engine, which provides instant and up-to-date information, and Bing’s GPT model, to ensure that the user has up-to-date information. We can call this a kind of grounding method. I think you can better understand how it works from the above diagram.
Thanks to its grounding technique, Prometheus can be used to monitor weather, stocks, sports, news, etc. It gives instant information in response to the user’s request. It supports these replies with links in Bing’s chat area and directs traffic to where the information is being retrieved. As a result, Bing powered by Prometheus is more powerful than ChatGPT.
There is work to be done
Microsoft remains aware of its shortcomings when it comes to Prometheus. One of them is artificial intelligence confusing in long chat sessions. In its blog post, Microsoft once again emphasizes that there are constant innovations and improvements to the system. For example, Microsoft plans to increase the ground data sent to the model by a factor of 4 to improve the accuracy of chat responses.
Microsoft has also struggled to integrate Prometheus with Bing, and opinions are divided into two groups. While some wanted a question-and-answer approach like Conversation, others argued that classic search should continue. In fact, there are cases where both are right. Some search queries can be reached faster with a classic search. So Microsoft had to design a new user interface by separating both the search and the new chat part.
Also, when people search for something on the internet, they have stereotyped habits and the image that comes to mind is ingrained. There could be serious problems if Bing or Google suddenly shelved the classic search mask.
“I firmly believe that search will never be the same again,” wrote Jordi Ribas, corporate vice president of search and artificial intelligence at Microsoft, in a blog post. Pointing to the future of the new search chat interaction model, he said, “This is just the beginning.” It seems that the competition between Microsoft and Google will be tougher than ever in recent years, and at least on the artificial intelligence-powered search engine side, Microsoft seems to have come out on top for the first time.
