Hang Tight: Waitlist for AI-Powered Bing Surges to ‘Multiple Millions’ of Users

Microsoft is telling users to be patient if they’ve signed up to try the new AI-powered Bing. Interest in the search engine has reached “multiple millions” of users, according to company vice president Yusuf Mehdi. 

That’s up from over 1 million(Opens in a new window) sign-ups 48 hours after Microsoft debuted the new Bing, which has been integrated with OpenAI’s ChatGPT to overhaul the whole search experience. 

The company created a waitlist(Opens in a new window) for users interested in testing the new Bing, which is currently in preview mode. But in some bad news, Mehdi said Microsoft has been “slowly scaling people off the waitlist daily,” rather than letting a large group test out the technology.

Still, Microsoft is sticking to its goal of rolling out the new Bing to millions of more users soon. “If you’re on the waitlist, just hang tight,” Mehdi said in a tweet(Opens in a new window) on Tuesday. “As we said at launch, we intend to scale to millions of people beginning in the coming weeks. We’re only one week in!”

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If you’re hoping to move up the waitlist, Mehdi reiterated that Microsoft is prioritizing users who have set Bing and Edge as their default search engines and browsers. Installing the Bing app on your phone can also raise your chances of getting access.

Microsoft is limiting the new Bing to a preview, likely because running the technology taps AI-powered algorithms that consume lots of computing power when serving large numbers of users. It’s also clear the new Bing is far from perfect. Microsoft’s own demo of the technology last week showed the search engine spouting several factual errors.

Since then, users with access to the Bing preview have noticed the search engine can also exhibit defensiveness and hostility when users question it(Opens in a new window). So it may take a while for the technology to exit the beta stages. 

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