Microsoft tells us that its Bing search engine has reached new heights and now has 100 million daily active users.
The news came via a post on the Microsoft Bing blog site (opens in a new tab) looking at the difference ChatGPT-powered AI has made to Bing traffic in its first month, pushing the numbers to over 100 million for the first time. . .
The company notes that there are over a million users of the new Bing AI (as a preview), and that has helped push the search engine's numbers to reach the new milestone.
Microsoft goes on to say that a third of Bing AI's "millions of active users" are new to Bing, showing that the chatbot is driving people to the search engine, though there seems to be an element of confusion here.
Is it "over a million" AI users or "millions"? While these statements aren't technically contradictory, we don't see why Microsoft didn't just call it "millions" in both cases, since it clearly sounds like more. Like a few million, or a few, even? Insert shrug here.
Still, Microsoft also acknowledged the glaring truth that Bing is still far from keeping up with Google: "This is a surprisingly remarkable number, and yet we're fully aware that we're still a small player outside of the low digits." single digits.That being said, it feels good to be at the dance!
Analysis: Can this growth be sustained?
Let's face it: Bing AI isn't just a chatbot. It's a vehicle to help Bing challenge Google, and Microsoft hopes it gets going quickly to gain momentum.
It is not just about gaining market share with the Bing search engine, it is also a line of attack for the Edge browser, as we have already seen with the implementation of the Bing AI taskbar in Windows 11: an icon that linked to the page from Bing, opening it in Edge.
(Note that after the bummer about this and how Microsoft made it look like the AI was embedded in the taskbar, instead of just a link, the Bing icon disappeared from the taskbar. Research at this point, although they tell us that they will come back periodically).
Either way, we can see Microsoft's plan working so far, with the Bing AI preview successfully recruiting regular users to add to the ranks of Bing researchers, and a healthy dose of them, but will this last? state of affairs?
We are doubtful. You see, the Bing chatbot is shiny, new, and still an object of curiosity right now. It had wide appeal to begin with, as you'd expect from new technology, and that interest has continued with measures like the recent introduction of a trio of personalities to experiment with, as well as various limits Microsoft had previously placed on cats. they get up.
And it's certainly still fun to push the AI, try to interact with it from different angles (humor is inevitably one of them), and generally mess up the chatbot. . However, it will not last.
Don't get me wrong, of course there will be serious users of the Bing bot, but we imagine that a significant part of the initial attraction comes from the curious or mischievous.
And in that sense, the initial numbers aren't really a measure of the impact the "new Bing," as Microsoft calls it, will have. If the growth is sustained and the AI is significantly refined and improved in the coming months, we can go back and talk about a new wave of Bing adoption.
Until then, we remain skeptical, and our general feeling is that Microsoft opened the doors too early on this one. We're not sure the AI is fine-tuned enough to seriously impress like it should have been for quite some time, but it's easy to see why Microsoft was interested in getting started. You need all the weapons you can muster in the battle against Google (and Chrome for that matter), and the latter company is stepping up with its own AI technology (Bard).
Through MS Power User (opens in a new tab)