(San Francisco) Microsoft opened access to the new version of its Bing search engine with artificial intelligence capabilities to everyone on Thursday, amid concerns about the rapid deployment of this technology.

The new Bing was until now only accessible to a limited number of users and subject to a waiting list.

Leading investor in OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, Microsoft has added the Californian company’s latest language model, GPT-4, to Bing, turning online research into a dialogue with a chatbot.

“Bing has surpassed 100 million daily active users and the number of mobile app installs has quadrupled since launch,” said Yusuf Mehdi, vice president of the American computing giant.

“As a result, Bing’s market share is growing and our Edge browser’s is growing for the eighth straight quarter,” he added, quoted in a statement.

Microsoft is taking its revenge on Google, after years of dominating its eponymous search engine, its Chrome browser and also innovation in artificial intelligence.

According to the specialized site Similarweb, Google still accounted for 90% of searches on the internet in March, Bing contenting itself with 3%.

The two companies embarked on a frantic race for generative AI this winter, since OpenAI released ChatGPT, an interface capable of producing all kinds of text on simple request in natural language.

In Europe and the United States, authorities are considering ways to regulate the booming industry.

Geoffrey Hinton, considered one of the founding fathers of artificial intelligence (AI), told a panel discussion hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) on Wednesday that the “existential threat” posed by the AI for Humanity was “serious and close”.

The computer scientist has just left Google, where he worked for ten years, “to be able to talk about the dangers of AI” freely, he explained.

Yusuf Mehdi on Thursday unveiled various improvements intended to transform digital interfaces into Internet users’ “co-pilot”.

Recently, Bing can also generate images, and users will soon be able to make image requests to it, to find similar content, for example.

On Edge, the chat window with Bing will remain active while browsing, and users will be able to view their chat history.

In February, Microsoft limited the number of interactions with Bing in a row to avoid causing “model confusion” after the chatbot declared his love to a New York Times reporter.

“In 90 days, our customers had over 500,000 conversations, and used Bing to get calibrated answers on everything from the best place to go on vacation with someone allergic to pollen, to a summary in tabular form of volcanic activity on earth for ten years,” boasted Yusuf Mehdi.