From 'Dog Eating Ice Cream' To 'Cat in Grass': Bing Now Decodes Contextual Image Descriptions

Microsoft Corp. MSFT has announced a new artificial intelligence (AI) model that gives image and language processing superpowers to the Bing search engine.

What Happened: Microsoft announced the Turing Bletchley v3 AI language model that aims to improve Bing's vision and text-based processing – essentially, it should make Microsoft's search engine a whole lot better.

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Microsoft has been expanding its footprint in the AI space – the most prominent decision it has taken is investing $11 billion in OpenAI and then using ChatGPT to power Bing Chat.

In fact, the new AI model already powers Bing search, allowing users to search for image search using context and descriptions of the subject in over 90 languages.

For example, some of these searches could be "dog eating ice cream", or "cat in a field of grass" – in both these cases, the user describes the context, which is eating ice cream and a field of grass, with the subjects being dog or cat.

Microsoft says that its new and enhanced AI model uses these context pointers and the data that it has been trained on – it combines these two aspects to return the vision-language based search results.

The company says that integrating this AI model in Bing image search has improved user engagement by 6%.

Not Just Bing: While improvements in the Bing search engine will be the most noticeable by users, Microsoft says it will also integrate the AI model into several other existing products.

One of these use cases is enforcing player safety on the Xbox gaming platform. This model helps Microsoft identify and weed out content deemed inappropriate or harmful to other users on the platform.

With the AI race on, we will likely see companies increasingly integrating AI across their portfolio to gain a competitive edge over rivals. With ChatGPT earlier and now this enhanced AI model, it remains to be seen if Bing gains some ground over Google search.

Image – Shutterstock

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