Microsoft Defends New Bing, Says AI Chatbot Upgrade Is Work in Progress

Just over a week after Microsoft Corp. MSFT -2.66%decrease; red down pointing triangle unveiled its new Bing search engine powered by the technology behind the buzzy ChatGPT artificial-intelligence chatbot, early testers are calling out mistakes and disturbing responses generated by the technology.

Microsoft said that the search engine is still a work in progress, describing the past week as a learning experience that is helping it test and improve the new Bing. So far, only a select set of people have been given access to it. The company said in a blog post late Wednesday that the Bing upgrade is “not a replacement or substitute for the search engine, rather a tool to better understand and make sense of the world.”

Microsoft unveiled the upgraded Bing during an event last week at its Redmond, Wash., headquarters. The company said the change enables a new kind of search in which people will pose questions to the search engine in natural language and Bing will generate direct answers and suggestions, as opposed to pointing users toward different websites.