Microsoft Makes Its Bing Chatbot Available On Mobile, And Loosens The Restriction A Bit

With more powerful hardware, the increasingly complex calculations computers can make are making more things possible.

And among the many things computers can help create, is the advancements of AI. Not long before this, the AI field was dull and quiet, and the buzz it created mostly happened within its own field, and rarely reach far beyond its own audience.

When OpenAI introduced ChatGPT as a AI chatbot tool, the internet was quickly captivated.

This is because the AI is able to do a wide range of tasks, including writing poetry, technical papers, novels, and essays.

And when Microsoft started embedding the technology into Bing and Edge, the world is again in awe.

In both the good way and the bad way, Bing has showed that its ChatGPT-powered Bing is indeed conversational and powerful. Bing successfully proved that the AI is useful.

However, the AI is manipulative, and Microsoft had to limit interactions in order to prevent the AI from becoming too emotional.

Less than a week later, after making major fixes to stop the AI from going off the rails, Microsoft is ready to take its Bing chatbot mainstream.

The company said that it is bringing the new AI technology to its Bing smartphone app, as well as the app for its Edge internet browser app.

What this means, Microsoft is finally putting the enhanced search engine into the hands of smartphone users, as a way to give Bing an advantage over Google.

At this time, Google still dominates the internet search business by a long margin. But with the hype of ChatGPT and how it becomes the fastest-growing consumer app in the world that sent tremors to Google, even Google has yet to release its own ChatGPT to the public after its $100 billion Bard AI mistake.

So here, Bing is certainly under the spotlight with the ChatGPT-powered Bing chatbot.

Since it was released two weeks prior, more than a million users around the world have experimented with a public preview of the new product after signing up for a waitlist to try it.

Bing's chatbot is powered by the same technology behind the popular ChatGPT.

Built by Microsoft partner OpenAI, ChatGPT is built on top of GPT-3 family of large language models, which has been fine-tuned using both supervised and reinforcement learning techniques.

But Bing's chatbot in particular, was created on a customized version of ChatGPT, and that it has developed an odd behavior and temper.

In a tweak, Microsoft started allowing users to only ask five queries to the AI, and let the AI to respond to only those five.

"After a chat session hits five turns, people will be prompted to start a new topic. At the end of each chat session, context needs to be cleared so the model won't get confused," Microsoft clarified.

This time, Microsoft is easing the restriction a bit.

"Since placing the chat limits, we have received feedback from many of you wanting a return of longer chats, so that you can both search more effectively and interact with the chat feature better," the company said in a blog post.

Here, Microsoft is loosening the restrictions to allow six chat turns per session and 60 total chats per day, which it says is enough to accommodate the "natural daily use of Bing" for the "vast majority" of users.

And if everything goes well, Microsoft said that it plans to increase the cap to 100 total chats per day.

After some more tweaks, Bing's chatbot has shown some manners, with users saying that it can now politely decline questions that it would have responded to just a week ago.

"I’m sorry but I prefer not to continue this conversation," the AI said 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."

Besides on Bing and Edge, Microsoft in another blog post also said that it is launching a worldwide preview of what it's calling "AI-powered Bing for Skype".