Microsoft confirms Bing was running GPT-4 all along

While the entire internet was scrambling to figure out how to get access to OpenAI's newly announced GPT-4, Microsoft dropped a quiet bombshell.

You might have already been using it for over a month.

Microsoft's Yusuf Mehdi confirmed that the new Bing has actually been running on GPT-4 all along, customized specifically for web search. If you managed to get into the Bing preview at any point over the last five weeks, you were secretly test-driving an early version of OpenAI’s latest flagship model.

The worst-kept secret is official

Ever since the new Bing preview launched, users noticed it felt significantly more capable and conversational than standard GPT-3.5 chatbots. Microsoft simply described the engine as a next-generation model, keeping the exact branding under wraps.

Now the veil is off. Mehdi noted that Bing's implementation is tailored specifically around search workflows, combining OpenAI's foundational breakthroughs with Microsoft's own proprietary ranking and interface updates.

Crucially, Microsoft confirmed that as OpenAI continues to update GPT-4 and whatever comes beyond it, Bing will continuously inherit those improvements alongside its own community-driven updates.

For anyone still waiting on the sidelines, the access route remains unchanged: sign up for the new Bing preview waitlist, wait for approval, and you can search, chat, and create right on Bing.com.

Why it matters

We think this is one of the smartest distribution plays Microsoft has pulled off in decades.

Instead of making GPT-4 feel like an elite, gatekept developer tool, Microsoft quietly weaponized it as a consumer acquisition magnet. By making Bing the de facto free portal to OpenAI's most advanced model, Microsoft gives everyday users an immediate, tangible reason to switch away from default search habits.

It also puts immense pressure on rivals. Microsoft wasn't just prototyping behind closed doors; it battle-tested GPT-4 on millions of real-world search queries for five weeks before competitors even saw the final model specs.

That said, high-end reasoning doesn't automatically solve the fundamental problem of search hallucination. Bing's early conversational quirks proved that fine-tuning an unruly frontier model for factual web retrieval is an ongoing tightrope walk.

If you want to see what the state-of-the-art AI feels like without buying paid subscriptions, hopping onto the Bing waitlist is currently the easiest path forward.