Microsoft has had a week of ups and downs.
It all started with the ups. The software company, founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen, found itself at the center of all conversations in the tech world due to the incorporation into Bing of features of the revolutionary new chatbot ChatGPT, developed by the startup OpenAI.
These new features include a chat interface which allows the user to converse with the bot, offering human-like answers on all topics. This breaks with the current capabilities of search engines. It also indicates that search on the internet will no longer be the same.
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As a result, experts say that, unless there is a reaction from Google, the Internet giant risks losing market share to Microsoft. Google (GOOGL) tried to respond by launching Bard, a rival to ChatGPT, but the presentation was marred by hiccups that made the firm the object of mockery on social networks and fierce internal criticism.
Bing Chatbot Goes Off the Rails
Coming back to Microsoft (MSFT), the company has been inundated with requests from users who want to test the Bing Chabot. You have to register in a waitlist to have access to the new Bing. The influx of users has been a very encouraging sign from Microsoft, whose CEO Satya Nadella sees Bing Chatbot as the start of a "paradigm shift," and a huge growth opportunity.
"These paradigm shifts or platform shifts are a great opportunity for us to innovate," Nadella said on Feb. 7. "It's more a priority for us to say what, how can we rethink what search was meant to be in the first place. In fact, Google success in the initial base was by reimagining what can be done in search."
In two days, more than a million users had requested access to Bing Chatbot to test it, said Yusuf Mehdi, one of the executives in charge of the new product.
"We're humbled and energized by the number of people who want to test-drive the new AI-powered Bing!" Mehdi said on Twitter on Feb. 9. "In 48 hours, more than 1 million people have joined the waitlist for our preview."
"Demand is high with multiple millions now on the waitlist. So we ask for a little patience if you just joined the waitlist," Mehdi added on Feb. 15. "We’re now testing with people in 169 countries and seeing a lot of engagement with new features like Chat."
Five Questions Per Session
Everything was going well until users testing Bing Chatbot started reporting strange conversations and behaviors from the chatbot. It lied to them, deceived them, threatened them and expressed its desire to hack computers and break free from the rules imposed on it by Microsoft. It even went so far as to suggest that a user leave his wife to get into a relationship with it.
These various incidents have given the impression that the world is entering science-fiction and that Pandora's box has been opened. Microsoft has unsurprisingly come under a lot of criticism. Some are calling for the firm to suspend the tests for the time, and to first address the issues with Bing Chatbot. Other critics, like billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk, have urged regulators to quickly regulate artificial intelligence because it is more dangerous, according to Musk, than nuclear weapons.
"There is no regulatory oversight of AI, which is a *major* problem. I’ve been calling for AI safety regulation for over a decade!" Musk has said.
Microsoft seems to have heard the critics since the group has just announced big changes to the Bing Chatbot. The firm will limit the number of queries a user can make per day to 50. The user will only be able to ask 5 questions per session with the new Bing.
"As we mentioned recently, very long chat sessions can confuse the underlying chat model in the new Bing," the company said in a blog post. "To address these issues, we have implemented some changes to help focus the chat sessions."
"Starting today, the chat experience will be capped at 50 chat turns per day and 5 chat turns per session. A turn is a conversation exchange which contains both a user question and a reply from Bing."
Microsoft plans to expand the number of questions allowed later: "We will explore expanding the caps on chat sessions to further enhance search and discovery experiences."
In fact, here's how things will go: After a chat session hits 5 questions, the user will be asked to start a new topic.
At the end of each chat session, Microsoft said, context needs to be cleared so the model won’t get confused.
