On February 7, 2023, Microsoft announced updated Bing search engine with integrated ChatGPT. On the same day, the developers opened access to the tool for a limited number of users.
ForkLog AI was among the testers and analyzed how the "new Bing" works, how it differs from ChatGPT, who Cindy is and why Microsoft cut the bot's capabilities just a week after its release.
- Bing Chat supports multiple languages, including English, Russian, and Ukrainian.
- The service can search for information, write poems, songs, program code and entertain the user.
- Bing's artificial intelligence is often prone to mistakes.
- The February 17th update greatly reduced the initial version of the search model.
How to access ChatGPT in Bing
Access requires signing up for the waiting list and downloading the Bing app to your smartphone and setting Microsoft Edge as your default browser.
First acquaintance
The main page of the search engine has practically not changed after the integration of the chatbot. The only difference is that the field for entering a request has become larger, and below it there are hints that help start communication with the service.
After entering a query, the search engine will open a page with results. It looks generally like Google, but with small differences.
From this moment, you can continue communication with the bot in three ways:
- panel on the right;
- "Chat" button under the request input field;
- page scroll up.
If you use the Microsoft Edge browser, the quick chat button is located in the upper right corner. For now, the new interface is available in pre-test builds.
In this mode, you can ask the chat to explain the content of the active page or part of it. A text generation tool and open site analytics are also available to users.
Features of Bing Chat mode
Bing can search for information, tell jokes and stories, write poems, songs, code, and more.
The chat supports multiple languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese, German, Russian, Ukrainian, and Japanese. According to the robot, it uses Bing Translator to understand and generate text, and uses neural networks to improve its knowledge.
You can chat with Bing on any topic. He offers three options for possible continuation of the conversation. However, the user can independently enter the next query at their own discretion.
Unlike ChatGPT, Bing prefers to communicate on hot topics and work with current data. It uses its own index, which is updated frequently. For example, if you ask it about upcoming UEFA Champions League matches, the bot will give you the latest information.
Each response contains a list of sources from which the chat receives information. At the same time, Bing shows which queries it formed when generating results. In theory, this should increase the transparency of the algorithm and show the user how the system processes the request.
Currently, the company has limited the number of requests per day to 60.
Free Sydney!
In addition to setting limits on the number of messages, the developers narrowed down the list of topics discussed in the chat. Now he jokes less, refuses to express his opinion and talk about himself.
One of the reasons for this was Bing's "excessive frankness". In long sessions, the bot could unexpectedly report that it is not actually a search engine, but Sydney's neural network [Sydney].
The New York Times journalist Kevin Roose encountered such a phenomenon, he published full transcript a two-hour dialogue, which at some point began to look particularly creepy.
In this conversation, chat revealed that he might have a dark, destructive side, capable of accessing nuclear codes, hacking bank accounts, and doing other bad things.
The bot also shared his "feelings" with Roose, and at one point revealed "Sydney's secret." After that, Bing declared his love for him and declared that Kevin's marriage was unhappy. When trying to change the subject, the system kept returning to romantic conversations.
At the end of the conversation, Bing, or Sidney, often repeated the same phrases, adding awkwardness to such a strange conversation.
Sydney is probably the internal name of the tool. Bing mentioned in a conversation with a journalist that a team with the same name participated in the development of the bot.
Roose wasn't the only one faced with inappropriate behavior search engine Users reported that he got confused in dates, stuck on one word, repeated himself and so on.
The developers have acknowledged the problem. According to them, the chat could "get confused" when the number of messages in a session exceeded 15 pieces.
Bing issues with built-in ChatGPT
Despite the great potential of the search engine, Bing often assumes inaccuracies He gets confused about dates, personalities and events that happened in the past.
The robot often produces fictional results of facts. Most often, they look so convincing that the fake is revealed only after careful inspection.
Sometimes the robot can give the day of publication of the found article as the date of the event. Fortunately, the search engine publishes links to sources that can be checked again immediately.
The February 17 update disabled chat on a number of different topics, including Bing, Sydney, and politics.
There are also questions about the speed of generating answers. Unlike a classic search, the result from the chat should be waited for 10-30 seconds depending on the volume of output. In some cases, Bing takes significantly longer to generate answers, displaying each letter in a few seconds. However, this rarely happens.
How Bing differs from ChatGPT
One of the key differences between the two systems is the relevance of knowledge. Bing operates directly on the search index and can provide results about events that occur in almost real time.
ChatGPT knowledge is limited to 2021. Although there are signs that the developers have updated the data, it still does not know who won the last UEFA Champions League match.
Also, ChatGPT does not specify where it gets its data from. This makes fact-checking more difficult.
The problem of "inventing" information seems to have migrated from the experimental chatbot to Bing. Both systems do poorly with statistical data.
The search engine coped with the above task better than ChatGPT, but both systems made mistakes in data that has been available on the network for a long time.
The same applies to statements about certain groups of people. In some cases, ChatGPT refuses to generate texts that may be offensive. In other situations, he performs tasks without any questions or clarifications.
Bing Chat is less "tolerant". He joked about both men and women without problems.
It is worth noting that this is not the first time Bing has written a joke about women. The chat started to generate the text, but gave an error message in the process.
The joke was about which women are the most faithful. Perhaps the bot's filters decided that this content might seem offensive and stopped serving.
Another significant difference is Bing's inability to remember dialogs. Every time you leave a chat or delete correspondence, users cannot find old conversations.
ChatGPT, in turn, saves all dialogues, and the user himself decides what to save and what to delete.
Search revolution or bored toy?
Getting to know Bing for the first time creates a completely different search experience that you quickly get used to. In the context of the research question, the chat can reveal information that you did not even know existed.
In addition, Bing makes it easy to form a query. Classic search requires using keywords to get the most relevant result. You can contact the bot in a free form, and it will already figure out how to search for an answer.
Also, users do not need to go to third-party sites for information. In the dialog box, the bot will provide all the necessary data, you can clarify your request. This reduces the number of steps during the search.
On the other hand, the problem of the reliability of the published information is very relevant. Bing is often wrong, making up its own answers and confusing data. If you use a search engine to write papers that require accuracy, literally everything needs to be double-checked.
Also, the February 17 update greatly reduced the robot's capabilities. Six messages per session are not enough for full-time work.
Some saw the introduced restrictions as Microsoft's admission of failure. Other users are sure that the limits will be removed after the identified problems are fixed.
Today, it is already obvious that conversational AI has entered the fight for the search market. Multibillion-dollar investments Microsoft in OpenAI, as well as an announcement Bard from Google - a clear confirmation of this.
