A day in Redmond: Microsoft reinvents search
Satya Nadella and Sam Altman unveil an AI-enhanced Bing. The new search engine works like a co-pilot through the internet – the concept is fundamentally different.
I spent a day at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond to see, first-hand, what the company means when it talks about fundamentally changing how we search the internet.
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman unveiled a new version of Bing enhanced with artificial intelligence. Like a kind of co-pilot, the system is designed to search the internet on our behalf.
This is a fundamentally different concept of how to navigate the web. Instead of a list of links, we get personalised and curated answers to specific questions.
The new Bing produces impressive results – but it also produces confident-sounding falsehoods. Because the system works so well otherwise, those errors are not easy to catch. That makes them particularly dangerous.
Whether Microsoft ends up as the dominant player in this space remains to be seen. Google is strong in this area too, and it developed many of the technical foundations on which OpenAI and Microsoft are now building. What is not in doubt: the way we move through the internet is about to change radically.