Microsoft is fixing the downright confusing, neurotic Bing, we’re also getting new features

As we reported, Microsoft didn’t speculate too much and took advantage of the popularity of ChatGPT, which exploded in the fall, in an accelerated manner, having already implemented the technology behind the universal chatbot in the Bing search engine.

So early testers may already be having extensive conversations with rival Google, but early experience suggests that the improved Bing is not yet at the top of the game: the service has become a meme in recent days. giving answers to certain questions, reminiscent of a mental breakdown, or completely losing the thread, and begins to repeat the same thing.

The internet is flooded with the strangest conversations, such as one user refusing to search for Avatar screenings because Bing says it’s still 2022. When the user denied this, the search engine called him unreasonable and stubborn.

The Bing subreddit has quite a few examples of the new Bing chat getting out of control.

Open chat in search now might be a bad idea!

Taken here as a reminder that there was a time when a major search engine showed this in their results. pic.twitter.com/LiE2HJCV2z

— Vlad (@vladquant) February 13, 2023

Now Microsoft has responded to the issue in a blog post in which they not only provided information about Bing’s neurosis, but also announced some new features are coming. As for the chatbot confusion, according to the Redmonds, it’s mostly caused by the length of the conversations:

“In long, drawn-out conversations with more than 15 questions, Bing can lose a thread. […] … it then becomes repetitive and may be provoked into a response that is unhelpful or perhaps not in line with Microsoft policy.”

According to the official rationale, this is because Bing can “forget” what the original question was, in which case the conversation could fall apart completely. Microsoft is addressing this issue by making it easier for users to restart chat searches. The operator also touched on the fact that Bing responds to users in a slightly blunt tone from time to time. The reason for this is that in the pursuit of fidelity to life, the algorithm tries to adapt to the style of its human interlocutor, which the engineers will try to make more acceptable with the help of additional fine-tuning.

Moving on to new features, it is already beginning to take shape how Microsoft wants to improve the chatbot based on the OpenAI GPT language model based on first experience. In giving direction, the company clarified that it sees the new Bing not primarily as a search engine, but as a tool to help us better understand the world.

In the spirit of this, Microsoft promises to address one of the weaknesses of the platform, providing up-to-date information (such as match results), which currently suffers from serious shortcomings. To that end, they provide the algorithm with four times as much “base data”, hoping to fill gaps in Bing’s knowledge.

Another major change will be the addition of a slider that will allow users to manually adjust the response between precision and creativity. Giving a chatbot more freedom with this can show off its inherent AI capabilities, but only at the risk of receiving an incorrect or nonsensical response.

In addition to all this, the development team is also working on completely new features, among which Microsoft highlighted sending emails and booking airline tickets. Unfortunately, there is no word on when they can be included in the repertoire, the blog only says that they will appear in one of the “future releases”.

Overall, Bing, armed with the power of ChatGPT, is still far from its final version, but the limited subscription test serves to provide the general public with a much more versatile product.

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