Microsoft clarifies Bing AI waitlist, plans to expand it to other browsers

Microsoft’s head of consumer marketing, Yusuf Mehdi, took to Twitter to clarify some things about the waitlist to try the company’s revamped Bing, which mostly amounts to telling people to “hang tight.” However, Mehdi also noted Microsoft plans to expand bing Chat to “all browsers.”

According to Mehdi, the new Bing — which includes Bing Chat powered by an updated version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT — is currently in ‘Limited Preview’ so Microsoft “can test, learn, and improve.”

“If you’re on the waitlist, just hang tight. As we said at launch, we intend to scale to millions of people beginning in the coming weeks. We’re only one week in!” Mehdi wrote, noting that the company is “scaling people off the waitlist daily.”

Mehdi went on to explain that Microsoft is prioritizing people with Bing and the company’s Edge browser set as their default, as well as the Bing Mobile app installed, to “optimize the initial experience.”

This leads to perhaps the most interesting tidbit in Mehdi’s post. “Over time we intend to bring it to all browsers,” he wrote. That should relieve anyone wanting to play around with Bing Chat but not interested in committing to Microsoft’s Edge browser. Currently, people with access to Bing Chat who attempt to use it on a browser that isn’t Edge get a prompt to move to Edge to “unlock conversational search.”

I’ve been using Edge Dev for the last few days since it gives me access to Bing Chat and other AI-powered features built directly into the browser (presumably, the in-browser integrations won’t come to other browsers). But aside from the benefit of having Bing Chat open next to whatever I’m working on, and some other small features like the ability for it to interact with the webpage I’m currently viewing, there’s not a ton of difference between Bing Chat in Edge and Bing Chat on the web.

Finally, Mehdi said that Microsoft is testing Bing with people in 169 countries.

Source: Yusuf Mehdi