The new AI-powered versions of the Microsoft Bing search engine and its web browser Edge have been a huge success since their launch.
According to a blog post shared by Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s VP & Consumer Chief Marketing Officer, more than 100 million people are using the two applications every day.
The figure is a “surprisingly notable” according to Mehdi, although the company knows that it is still a relatively small player in both areas of the internet space.
“It feels good to be at the dance,” he said, possibly referring to the fact that the company may now have the necessary guns to challenge Alphabet (GOOG), its search engine Google and web browser Chrome.
The executive further highlighted that the company is thrilled to see that roughly a third of Bing’s new users are now to the product.
He emphasized that the company’s new value proposition delivers four services in a single place, which are search, answers, chat, and creation.
Two factors appear to be driving users’ rapid adoption of Bing and Edge – the first is that more and more people are embracing the Edge web browser.
Meanwhile, the second factor is associated with an improvement in the relevance of the search results provided by Bing as a result of the incorporation of the Prometheus AI model.
Microsoft Says That Relevance of Bing’s Search Results is at an All-time High
Mehdi asserted that the search quality of Bing is currently “at an all-time high” and, since the test version of Bing was launched, roughly 45 million total chats have been created with an average of three chats per session.
In addition, Mehdi said that 15% of users have been using the tool to create content, meaning that creativity is becoming one of the most popular practical uses of the AI-powered Bing, not just search.
After 30 days, a few stats on new Bing engagement:
– 45M total chats
– 1/3 of daily preview users Chat daily
– 1/3 of preview users are brand new to Bing
– Bing (new and old) passes 100M DAU – and yes we know we are still a small, https://t.co/3ntxy0oq63… https://t.co/xMBVKxVNUN— Yusuf Mehdi (@yusuf_i_mehdi) March 9, 2023
Also read: Microsoft Uses OpenAI’s Next Gen AI to Reshape its Bing Search Engine
In a Tweet on Wednesday, Mehdi wrote that the company expanded the limits for daily sessions and chats per session to 120 and 10, respectively.
Microsoft’s engineers keep making improvements to the AI engine so it does not drift out of topic or hallucinates.
“It’s been an amazing 30 days and the team is energized to continue to iterate and improve Bing and Edge to deliver the next generation of search and what we hope becomes your trusted copilot for the web,” the executive concluded.
Microsoft and OpenAI Appear to be Leading the AI-Powered Internet Thus far
OpenAI paved the way for this early success of Microsoft’s two internet products as the company made artificial intelligence (AI) a mainstream trending topic in just a couple of months.
Notably, it took Microsoft half the time of OpenAI to reach 100 million daily active users.
This is not necessarily surprising as the company has more resources and can reach billions of people via its popular operating systems and productivity tools.
However, the popularity of both Bing and Edge are indications that the Redmond-based tech company is on the right track to fully take advantage of the new AI trend.
The same can’t be said about Google as the company appears to have been unprepared to present a competing product that is powered by this technology.
Its 49% stake in OpenAI positions Microsoft uniquely to benefit from this AI trend as more and more companies are using ChatGPT, Whisper, and Dall-E to offer a new generation of AI-powered products and services.
It is still very early to say who will ultimately secure the lead in this up-and-coming industry but, from what it seems thus far, Microsoft is stretching the distance with its competitors every day.