Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft has spent a lot of time and energy over the last few months adding generative AI features to all its products, particularly its long-standing, long-struggling Bing search engine. And now the company is working on fusing this fast-moving, sometimes unsettling new technology with some old headaches: ads.

In a blog post earlier this week , Microsoft VP Yusuf Mehdi said the company was "exploring placing ads in the chat experience," one of several things the company is doing "to share the ad revenue with partners whose content contributed to the chat response." The company is also looking into ways to let Bing Chat show sources for its work, sort of like the ways Google, Bing, and other search engines display a source link below snippets of information they think might answer the question you asked.

One of Microsoft's experimental formats for highlighting information sources in Bing Chat. (credit: Microsoft)

Sharing ad revenue with partners is an attempt to address a looming supply-and-demand problem for AI chatbots that dig through the Internet to find answers to user queries—someone needs to be making the content that Bing Chat uses to formulate its answers. If AI chatbots make content creation less lucrative, there's less information out there for AI chatbots to sift through, making it even harder for them to do what they're trying to do.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

On Thursday, OpenAI announced a plugin system for its ChatGPT AI assistant. The plugins give ChatGPT the ability to interact with the wider world through the Internet, including booking flights, ordering groceries, browsing the web, and more. Plugins are bits of code that tell ChatGPT how to use an external resource on the Internet.

Basically, if a developer wants to give ChatGPT the ability to access any network service (for example: "looking up current stock prices") or perform any task controlled by a network service (for example: "ordering pizza through the Internet"), it is now possible, provided it doesn't go against OpenAI's rules.

Conventionally, most large language models (LLM) like ChatGPT have been constrained in a bubble, so to speak, only able to interact with the world through text conversations with a user. As OpenAI writes in its introductory blog post on ChatGPT plugins, "The only thing language models can do out-of-the-box is emit text."

Enlarge / "A gaming PC riding a skateboard" as generated by the DALL-E 2-powered Bing Image Creator. The version of DALL-E in the Bing Chat preview may be more advanced. (credit: Bing Image Creator)

Microsoft is giving its work-in-progress Bing AI chatbot the ability to generate images, the company announced today . Bing preview users can generate images by typing "create an image" (or something similar) followed by the prompt. As with other AI-powered image generators, the more detailed a prompt you provide, the more specific and consistent the output is.

Not all Bing preview users will be able to generate images right away, as Microsoft is rolling the feature out in phases (it's not working for me as of this writing). Initially, it will only work in the chatbot's "Creative" mode . The bot has three "personalities," and "Creative" is the most prone to giving wrong answers and inaccurate information.

Microsoft said it was using "an advanced version" of the DALL-E generator without providing additional details. The Bing chatbot was using OpenAI's GPT-4 model several weeks before it was formally announced to the public, so Microsoft could also be using a more powerful pre-release version of the DALL-E model. The image generator Microsoft made available to the public in October uses DALL-E 2.

Enlarge (credit: Ars Technica)

As part of pre-release safety testing for its new GPT-4 AI model , launched Tuesday, OpenAI allowed an AI testing group to assess the potential risks of the model's emergent capabilities—including "power-seeking behavior," self-replication, and self-improvement.

While the testing group found that GPT-4 was "ineffective at the autonomous replication task," the nature of the experiments raises eye-opening questions about the safety of future AI systems.

Raising alarms

"Novel capabilities often emerge in more powerful models," writes OpenAI in a GPT-4 safety document published yesterday. "Some that are particularly concerning are the ability to create and act on long-term plans, to accrue power and resources (“power-seeking”), and to exhibit behavior that is increasingly 'agentic.'" In this case, OpenAI clarifies that "agentic" isn't necessarily meant to humanize the models or declare sentience but simply to denote the ability to accomplish independent goals.

Enlarge (credit: NurPhoto / Contributor | NurPhoto )

An entire team responsible for making sure that Microsoft’s AI products are shipped with safeguards to mitigate social harms was cut during the company’s most recently layoff of 10,000 employees, Platformer reported .

Former employees said that the ethics and society team was a critical part of Microsoft's strategy to reduce risks associated with using OpenAI technology in Microsoft products. Before it was killed off, the team developed an entire “responsible innovation toolkit” to help Microsoft engineers forecast what harms could be caused by AI—and then to diminish those harms.

Platformer’s report came just before OpenAI released possibly its most powerful AI model yet, GPT-4 , which is already helping to power Bing search, Reuters reported .

Enlarge (credit: Microsoft)

Microsoft's Bing has never been in any danger of overtaking Google as the Internet's most popular search engine. But the headline-grabbing AI-powered features from the "new Bing" preview that the company launched last month do seem to be helping—Microsoft said today that Bing had passed the 100 million daily active users mark.

"We are fully aware we remain a small, low, single digit share player," writes Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi, driving home just how small Microsoft's share of the search market is compared to Google's. "That said, it feels good to be at the dance!"

Google doesn't provide daily active user numbers for its search engine, but StatCounter data suggests that its marketshare typically hovers just under 90 percent in the US, compared to 6 or 7 percent for Bing.