A couple of weeks ago, Microsoft unveiled its new Bing Chat search engine, powered by ChatGPT-like technology from OpenAI. While it is the ChatGPT that provides the AI heart of the new Bing, Microsoft and OpenAI made some changes and call the underlying technology Prometheus. This week, Microsoft is now offering more details about Prometheus.
Jordi Ribas, head of engineering for Microsoft Bing, has written a LinkedIn blog post explaining how Prometheus works.
Development on the technology started last summer when OpenAI gave Microsoft a demo of its ChatGPT chatbot AI. Of course, Microsoft was a major investor in OpenAI, which explains the early access. Since then, Microsoft has doubled down on OpenAI and invested billions more dollars into the group.
Ribas explains that Microsoft already though it could find a way to integrate ChatGPT into Bing to create a modern AI-driven search experience. From this belief, the company began to create Prometheus:
“Prometheus leverages the power of Bing and GPT to generate a set of internal queries iteratively through a component called Bing Orchestrator, and aims to provide an accurate and rich answer for the user query within the given conversation context. All within a matter of milliseconds. We refer to this Prometheus-generated answer as the Chat answer.”
Combination
So, essentially Prometheus is Bing search combined with ChatGPT natural language processing. Ribas points out that the combination allows the chatbot to be more accurate:
“Thanks to the Bing grounding technique, Prometheus is also able to integrate citations into sentences in the Chat answer so that users can easily click to access those sources and verify the information. Sending traffic to these sources is important for a healthy web ecosystem and remains one of our top Bing goals.”
Since its launch in limited preview, Bing Chat has had issues including arguing with users. Microsoft issued a limit on how many users can access the bot. However, the company has since made improvements to the search engine and is starting to ease usage limits.
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