Microsoft is ditching the waitlist for its AI-powered Bing search engine so anyone can try it, and launching a host of new features

• Microsoft is getting rid of the waitlist for people wanting to test its new AI-powered search engine.
• It is introducing new AI features on Bing such as giving users the ability to search visually.

A swathe of new AI features are coming to Microsoft's Bing, including the ability to search visually with images instead of just text, and the tech giant is removing its waitlist so anybody can try out the AI tool, it said Thursday.

The new Bing — introduced in February in the wake of the success of OpenAI's ChatGPT — is getting a range of updates including the ability to make restaurant reservations, search movies, save chat history, and move from text-only search and chat to image-based search and results.

This means users will be able to carry out visual searches in the chat by uploading images and searching the web for content related to the images. Other visual updates will offer image-based answers like charts and graphs and the option to receive an answer in different formats.

This follows from Microsoft's integration of Bing Image Creator with Bing Chat, which lets users generate written and visual content in one place. It has now been updated so that Image Creator will be accessible in over 100 languages.

The announcement, authored by Microsoft's corporate vice president and consumer chief marketing officer Yusuf Mehdi, gave no concrete timeline for when the features will be rolled out, but Medhi told Bloomberg that the visual search feature will become available in the coming months, while updates like receiving answers through charts and graphs are coming sooner.

The delay is so that Microsoft's Responsible AI team can work to ensure user safety, Mehdi told Bloomberg.

"There's a lot of work to review technology and plans against," Mehdi told Bloomberg."Is it harmful? Is it transparent? Is it inclusive? Does it not have bias? We're going to do the same thing on the images, and adding multimodal adds another degree of complexity."

Bing — which functions using large language models like OpenAI's GPT4 — exceeded 100 million daily active users just a month after its AI update.

An early issue with the AI tool was that it produced strange and often disturbing answers including calling users delusional and even saying it wants to be human with emotions and dreams.

Those issues have since been resolved with Microsoft restricting how long users can speak with the chatbot.

Microsoft did not immediately respond to Insider's request for further comment about the new updates.