Microsoft recently announced that it is flexing restrictions on Bing’s chatbot. The firm also shared some new information about how the search engine Bing works. Microsoft has officially named the technology behind the new Bing as Prometheus.

One-of-a-kind: Microsoft Prometheus

In its blog post, Microsoft announced Prometheus, the first-of-its-kind artificial intelligence model that combines Bing indexing, ranking and results with OpenAI’s most advanced GPT model. While talking about Prometheus, Microsoft also underlines that it is a “proprietary technology”.

Prometheus leverages the power of Bing and ChatGPT to iteratively generate a set of internal queries through a component called Bing Orchestrator. Aiming to provide an accurate and rich response to the user query in the context of the given conversation, Prometheus accomplishes all this in just a few milliseconds. The response created by Prometheus is called the Chat response by Microsoft.

New Grounding technique

Models like ChatGPT represent a breakthrough in Large Language Models (LLM), but like other LLMs, OpenAI trained its own model with datasets over a specific time period. Therefore, these systems do not know anything about current information.

Microsoft Prometheus closes this gap. Prometheus acts as a bridge between the search engine that reaches instant and up-to-date information and Bing’s GPT model, ensuring that fresh information comes to the user. We can call this a kind of grounding method. I think you can better understand how it works from the diagram above.

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 query. It supports these replies with links in Bing’s Chat section and directs traffic to the place where the information is obtained. As a result, Bing powered by Prometheus is more powerful than ChatGPT.

There is work to be done

Microsoft is still aware of its shortcomings with regard to Prometheus. One of them is the confusion of artificial intelligence in long chat sessions. Microsoft once again underlines in its blog post that it is constantly making innovations and improvements to the system. For example, Microsoft plans to increase the grounding data sent to the model by a factor of 4 to improve the accuracy of Chat responses.

Microsoft has also had a hard time integrating Prometheus into Bing and opinions are divided into two groups. While some wanted a question-and-answer approach like the Conversation, others argued that the classic search should be continued. In fact, there are cases where both are right. Some queries can be reached faster with a classic search. Therefore, Microsoft had to design a new user interface by separating both the search and the new Chat part.

Moreover, when people want to search for something on the internet, they have stereotyped habits and the image that comes to their minds is ingrained. It could cause serious problems if Bing or Google suddenly shelved the classic search screen.

“I truly believe that search will never be the same again,” Jordi Ribas, Corporate Vice President of Search and Artificial Intelligence at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post. He pointed out the future of the new Search-Chat interaction model and 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-based search engine side, Microsoft seems to be ahead for the first time.