Microsoft appears to be expanding the preview program for the new Bing experience, meaning you no longer have to wait in line to be allowed to try it. Based on reports from Windows Central, as well as members of the XDA team, if you try to join the waitlist now, you'll immediately be accepted and you can start using the new Bing Chat capabilities.

This new chat-based experience for Bing was introduced in early February out of nowhere, and it was available in a very limited preview, though it expanded fairly quickly to more users on the waitlist. Since debuting on the web, the new Bing also made its way to mobile users, and it was recently integrated directly into the Edge browser. It's also "integrated" into Windows 11, meaning you'll see a shortcut for the feature within Windows Search, though it still takes you to the web browser to actually use it.

While it made a strong initial impression, users quickly started testing the limits of the new Bing Chat, resulting in strange and sometimes aggressive responses. Microsoft quickly limited the number of sessions, as well as the number of messages per session in an attempt to rein in the virtual agent, and it also added new tone options for a more personalized experience. The company has slowly been expanding the capabilities of Bing, with Microsoft CVP Yusuf Mehdi recently announcing that you can now send up to 150 messages per day and 15 per session.

Earlier this week, Microsoft confirmed that this whole experience is possible thanks to GPT-4, the latest version of OpenAI's large language model. When it was initially announced, Microsoft simply said the new Bing was running on a "next-generation" language model that was more advanced than the popular ChatGPT tool, but at the time, GPT-4 hadn't been announced yet. This language model allows Bing to interpret and generate messages in natural human language, and it's customized by Microsoft specifically for search. It can answer complex questions in a way a normal search engine couldn't, and you can even ask it to generate content or pull information from a specific page.

Microsoft has yet to announce the end of the waitlist, so it may be that the new Bing isn't quite ready for everyone to use just yet, so we'll have to wait and see. The company is holding an event tomorrow with a focus on AI, so maybe more news will come from that.

Source: Windows Central