Microsoft is ready to take its new Bing chatbot mainstream—less than a week after making major fixes to stop the artificially intelligent search engine from going off the rails.
The company said Wednesday it is bringing the new AI technology to its Bing smartphone app, as well as the app for its Edge internet browser.Putting the new AI-enhanced search engine into the hands of smartphone users is meant to give Microsoft an advantage over Google, which dominates the internet search business but hasn’t yet released such a chatbot to the public.
In the two weeks since Microsoft unveiled its revamped Bing, more than a million users around the world have experimented with a public preview of the new product after signing up for a wait list to try it. Microsoft said most of those users responded positively, but others found Bing was insulting them, professing its love or voicing other disturbing or bizarre language.
Powered by some of the same technology behind the popular writing tool ChatGPT, built by Microsoft partner OpenAI, the new Bing is part of an emerging class of AI systems that have mastered human language and grammar after ingesting a huge trove of books and online writings. They can compose songs, recipes, and emails on command, or concisely summarize concepts with information found across the internet. But they are also error-prone and unwieldy.
Reports of Bing’s odd behavior led Microsoft to look for a way to curtail Bing’s propensity to respond with strong emotional language to certain questions. It’s mostly done that by limiting the length and time of conversations with the chatbot, forcing users to start a fresh chat after several turns. But the upgraded Bing also now politely declines questions that it would have responded to just a week ago.
“I’m sorry but I prefer not to continue this conversation,” it says when asked technical questions about how it works or the rules that guide it. “I’m still learning, so I appreciate your understanding and patience.”
Microsoft said its new technology will also be integrated into its Skype messaging service.
Login to add comment
Other posts in this group
CrowdStrike reiterated its fiscal 2026 first quarter and annual forecast
The latest TikTok trend is leading to fire evacuations at schools across Connecticut.
As part of the trend, students are filming themselves inserting items such as pencils, paper clips,
Netflix is finally pushing out the major TV app redesign it started testing last year, with a top navigation bar and new recommendation features. It’s also experimenting with generative AI a
New AI features from LinkedIn will soon help job seekers find positions that best suit them—without the n
As the arms race in the artificial intelligence world ramps up, Big Tech companies are rushing to become your default AI source. Meta, last week, launched the Meta AI app to challenge ChatGPT and
Residents living near SpaceX headquarters in Boca Chica, Texas, will soon have a new public body through which to raise concerns about everything from road maintenance to garbage collection. Earli
