A little over a month after launching the new AI-powered Bing search, Microsoft appears to have removed the waitlist this week. On Wednesday, Windows Central reported that several members of their team were able to sign up for the new Bing and immediately gain access. The Verge then tried to sign up with multiple Microsoft accounts, all of which instantly received emails to let them know that they had access to the Bing chatbot.
Microsoft might be retiring its Bing waitlist
If you’re interested in trying out the new AI-powered Bing, head to Bing.com/new in your browser and hit “Join the waitlist.” After you sign in with a Microsoft account, you should gain access right away. You will need to switch to the Edge browser to use the chatbot.
“During this preview period, we are running various tests which may accelerate access to the new Bing for some users,” Microsoft director of communications Caitlin Roulston told The Verge. “We remain in preview and you can sign up at Bing.com.”
The apparent retirement of the waitlist comes just one day after Microsoft confirmed that Bing has been running on OpenAI’s GPT-4 multimodal language model.
“We are happy to confirm that the new Bing is running on GPT-4, which we’ve customized for search,” said Microsoft CVP Yusuf Mehdi in a blog post. “If you’ve used the new Bing preview at any time in the last five weeks, you’ve already experienced an early version of this powerful model. As OpenAI makes updates to GPT-4 and beyond, Bing benefits from those improvements. Along with our own updates based on community feedback, you can be assured that you have the most comprehensive copilot features available.”
Coincidentally (or not), Microsoft is also hosting another AI event on Thursday, March 16. It now seems likely that Microsoft will announce that the new Bing is available to everyone during the event. We’ll also learn more about GPT-4 and its vast potential.
