If you had told me that a million people would be falling over themselves to try Bing in 2023, I wouldn’t have known what to do with myself.
However, with Microsoft bringing OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology to the search engine, that’s exactly what has happened. Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President & Consumer Chief Marketing Officer, announced that signups to try the next generation of Bing have passed one million people. In fact, the company says that it crossed that milestone in less than 48 hours.
Mehdi said that “we’re humbled and energized by the number of people who want to test-drive the new AI-powered Bing! In 48 hours, more than 1 million people have joined the waitlist for our preview.”
The news comes a day after another report that downloads of the Bing app skyrocketed since Microsoft announced the next generation of the search engine. According to that report, the Bing app has seen a 10x increase in downloads since the announcement on Tuesday and is now one of the most popular apps on the App Store, beating out Google.
Although Microsoft announced the new version of Bing and Edge, both are still in a preview and not publicly available. In order to try out the new version of Bing, which is now powered by OpenAI, you need to sign up for the waitlist. In order to try the next generation of Edge, the company’s browser, you need to download the developer preview.
The news comes the same week that Microsoft announced the next generation of Bing, its search engine, and Edge, its web browser. The company is quickly raising competition against Google, which also recently announced a number of new features to search and maps that are powered by AI but Bard, the company’s competitor to the new version of Bing, isn’t seeing a launch for at least a few weeks.
