What's Prometheus on Bing Chat?

Although Bing Chat uses the GPT-4 model from OpenAI to offer an AI chatbox experience that answers questions in a conversational human style, that's just part of the equation since, to make it all work, Microsoft had to develop a technology known as "Prometheus."

Prometheus is a proprietary AI model technology that combines the Bing search engine information (such as indexing, ranking, and other data) and the technology behind ChatGPT to generate relevant and accurate answers using current web information. 

The reason for Prometheus on Bing Chat is that the OpenAI GPT model (like many other AI technologies) is trained using large sets of data from a specific point in time. Using this approach is helpful for some use cases, but it prevents the chatbot from offering answers to current events and other scenarios that may require data from the internet.

If you want to know how Prometheus works, you have to understand the process. When you ask a question on Bing Chat, the data is sent to the Bing Orchestrator, an essential component that analyses the user input to generate multiple related search queries to feed the system. You can see this in action when you submit a question, and before the response, you see "Searching for:" and "Generating answers for you,"  detailing the generated search intent.

In addition, as part of the "grounding technique," the query is combined with various other pieces of information (such as fresh data, news, answers, contextual signals, and location) from Bing that the GPT model will then use to analyze, reason, and generate the response. The entire process is what Microsoft refers to as Prometheus.

It's important to note that during the grounding process, that's where Microsoft applies safeguards to reduce inaccuracies and prevent offensive and harmful content.

Also, as a result of Prometheus, Bing Chat can show citations on the response that allows you to hover over a fragment to reveal the source of information you can use to verify the answer.

Furthermore, this technology is also responsible for showing regular search results on specific topics as well as results for images and videos.