Skip to main content

Microsoft’s Bing Chat waitlist is gone — how to sign up now

It appears Microsoft is doing away with the long Bing Chat waitlist. As originally reported by Windows Central, new users who sign up for the waitlist are immediately given access to the AI chatbot, without having to wait, and Digital Trends has confirmed this to be the case.

Microsoft hasn’t officially killed the waitlist, but it should go away in short order. On Tuesday, Microsoft bolstered OpenAI’s launch of the GPT-4 model by confirming that it was the model behind Bing Chat. Microsoft is also set to host an AI-focused event on Thursday, where we expect to hear about AI integrations in Microsoft’s Office apps like Word and PowerPoint. It’s possible Microsoft could remove the waitlist during the presentation.

Microsoft Edge browser showing Bing Chat on an iPhone.
Alan Truly / Digital Trends

In the initial days of Microsoft’s Bing Chat announcement, more than 1 million people signed up for the waitlist. Microsoft has said millions more have joined since. It only took us a few days to get access through the public waitlist, though our initial time with Bing Chat didn’t go as expected. Since the launch, Microsoft has vastly restricted Bing Chat’s responses due to some unhinged conversations. It has slowly gained more freedom, and users can now ask up to 15 questions in a single session and up to 150 in a day.

Recommended Videos

The explosion in popularity of ChatGPT has put a lot of focus on Microsoft, which partnered with OpenAI in 2019 and invested $10 billion in the research group earlier this year. Google hasn’t been sitting by, announcing its Bard AI chatbot in February. The search giant also released AI-powered tools for its suite of online apps on Tuesday, likely getting ahead of Microsoft’s announcements set for later in the week.

On top of Microsoft’s upcoming AI event, the company also released the Edge Copilot feature earlier in the week. This brings Bing Chat into a sidebar in Microsoft Edge, and it’s available to anyone who has access to Bing Chat (which, at this point, should be anyone). In addition to chat features, Edge Copilot includes a Compose tab that can generate text for emails, blog posts, and more, as well as an Insights tab that provides context for the website you’re on.

Microsoft has been building toward Bing Chat availability elsewhere, too. Since launch, Microsoft has rolled out the chatbot on mobile, for example, as well as added chatbot functionality to Skype.

Jacob Roach
Former Lead Reporter, PC Hardware
Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…
Meta’s new AI app lets you share your favorite prompts with friends
Meta AI WhatsApp widget.

Meta has been playing the AI game for a while now, but unlike ChatGPT, its models are usually integrated into existing platforms rather than standalone apps. That trend ends today -- the company has launched the Meta AI app and it appears to do everything ChatGPT does and more.

Powered by the latest Llama 4 model, the app is designed to "get to know you" using the conversations you have and information from your public Meta profiles. It's designed to work primarily with voice, and Meta says it has improved responses to feel more personal and conversational. There's experimental voice tech included too, which you can toggle on and off to test -- the difference is that apparently, full-duplex speech technology generates audio directly, rather than reading written responses.

Read more
It’s not your imagination — ChatGPT models actually do hallucinate more now
Deep Research option for ChatGPT.

OpenAI released a paper last week detailing various internal tests and findings about its o3 and o4-mini models. The main differences between these newer models and the first versions of ChatGPT we saw in 2023 are their advanced reasoning and multimodal capabilities. o3 and o4-mini can generate images, search the web, automate tasks, remember old conversations, and solve complex problems. However, it seems these improvements have also brought unexpected side effects.

What do the tests say?

Read more
ChatGPT’s awesome Deep Research gets a light version and goes free for all
Deep Research option for ChatGPT.

There’s a lot of AI hype floating around, and it seems every brand wants to cram it into their products. But there are a few remarkably useful tools, as well, though they are pretty expensive. ChatGPT’s Deep Research is one such feature, and it seems OpenAI is finally feeling a bit generous about it. 

The company has created a lightweight version of Deep Research that is powered by its new o4-mini language model. OpenAI says this variant is “more cost-efficient while preserving high quality.” More importantly, it is available to use for free without any subscription caveat. 

Read more