Microsoft’s new Bing daily users exceeded 100 million, mainly due to the integration of AI chat bots.

On March 10th, local time on Thursday, Microsoft said that the number of daily users of its bing search engine exceeded 100 million, mainly because the new version of Bing integrated the artificial intelligence chat function, and the number of users of the company’s Edge browser was also growing steadily.

Yusuf Mehdi, vice president and chief marketing officer of Microsoft, said, "We fully realize that our market share is still very small and low, with only single digits." He said that compared with Google, Microsoft’s share in the search market is quite small. "On the other hand, it feels good to go to the dance!"

Google has not published the number of daily users of search engines. However, according to StatCounter, the market share of Google search engines in the United States is usually slightly lower than 90%, compared with 6% or 7% for Bing.

Microsoft said that there are "millions of active users" who are trying out the preview version of Bing with integrated artificial intelligence chat function, and about one third of them are people who have never used Bing before. Microsoft also attributed this to the slow but steady growth of Microsoft Edge browser. Microsoft Edge browser sets Bing as the default search engine. If users insist on switching to other search engines, Edge browser will repeatedly prompt users to switch back to Bing.

A month ago, Microsoft launched the artificial intelligence chat robot function in the limited preview version of Bing, with OpenAI’s Large Language Model (LLM) as the supporting technology. So far, Microsoft has made some adjustments to the behavior of robots to solve the problem that robots sometimes have strange and threatening content in conversations. One of the changes is to limit the number of responses that the chat bot can give in a single instance, because the longer the conversation, the easier it is for the bot’s response to deviate. Recently, Microsoft also introduced some "personalized" functions for chat bots to make the answers more direct or interesting.

Last month, Microsoft began to add "New Bing" function to Edge browser, Skype, Windows 11 taskbar and some development tools. In addition, Microsoft is also testing "multi-modal artificial intelligence" technology, which can handle various forms of input including images, text, audio and video. (Chen Chen)