Starting today, Microsoft's Bing AI chatbot service is available to anyone to use. The dreaded waitlist is going away and, personally, I couldn't be happier. Similar to ChatGPT, Bing chatbot works by drawing information from the world wide web. All you have to do is ask it a question and you'll receive a human-like response (albeit of potentially questionable accuracy). The whole thing is powered by GPT-4, which is a language model created by OpenAI.

Microsoft's helpful Bing AI chatbot will be getting more ads, the company recently announced in a blog post, which was penned by corporate vice president Yusuf Mehdi. In a statement to The Verge, Caitlin Roulston, the company's director of communications, clarified that the "ads will show in the new Bing, specifically in chat (as they do in traditional search results)." Twitter user Debarghya Das provided a helpful visual on what the ads may look like within Bing chatbot after seeing some appear when asking about cheap Hondas. As you can see in the screenshot below, there are a number of tiny Ad boxes in the most relevant spots. These boxes will link back to Bing, of course.

If ChatGPT is your crazy Uncle Leo, Google's Bard is your goodie-two-shoes Aunt Martha. You know, the one who covers her couch with plastic. As with those others, you type a prompt into Bard and out pops prose that's likely better than your last texting convo. It can answer questions, draft emails and tell you a bedtime story. Yes, it can even write a newspaper column.

Microsoft has reportedly been testing its Bing AI chatbot "for years." The chatbot, which often refers to itself as Sydney, is reportedly the result of several years of work. According to The Verge, public tests for the chatbot inside Bing began in 2021 and took place in a small number of countries. "Sydney is an old codename for a chat feature based on earlier models that we began testing in India in late 2020," revealed Caitlin Roulston, director of communications at Microsoft, in a statement to The Verge. "The insights we gathered as part of that have helped to inform our work with the new Bing preview. We continue to tune our techniques and are working on more advanced models to incorporate the learnings and feedback so that we can deliver the best user experience possible."

Since it started opening up its generative AI-powered chatbot in Bing earlier this month, Microsoft has granted more than a million people access to a preview of the tool, while millions more are on the waitlist. Until now, the only way to access the chatbot has been through the Edge desktop browser. But Microsoft is already bringing it to more products, services and devices. Starting today, those with access to the chatbot through their Microsoft account can use it on the Edge and Bing mobile apps for Android and iOS. Tapping the Bing button at the bottom of the namesake mobile app will start a chat session.

Microsoft is trying to walk the line between pushing its tools out to the real world to build marketing hype and get free testing and feedback from users, versus limiting what the bot can do and who has access to it so as to keep potentially embarrassing or dangerous tech out of public view. The company initially got plaudits from Wall Street for launching its chatbot before archrival Google, which up until recently had broadly been seen as the leader in AI tech. Both companies are engaged in a race with each other and smaller firms to develop and show off the tech.

Fox News correspondent Mark Meredith has the latest on ChatGPT on'Special Report.' The Bing artificially intelligent chatbot can do a lot – including insult its users. In a Wednesday blog post, Microsoft said that the search engine tool was responding to certain inquiries with a "style we didn't intend." Following testing in 169 countries, over the first seven days, the tech giant said that while feedback on answers generated by the new Bing has been mostly positive, there were also noted challenges with answers that need timely data. Microsoft noted that Bing can be repetitive or "be prompted/provoked to give responses that are not necessarily helpful or in line with our designed tone."