Skip to main content

Microsoft responds to ChatGPT Bing’s first week of trial by fire

Microsoft is responding to some of the seemingly unhinged comments made by its Bing Chat AI. The service, which is currently in a limited public preview, has seen a trial by fire in its first week, and Microsoft has some updates planned to bring it more in line with the original vision of the AI.

As we reported yesterday, Bing Chat is capable of saying things such as “I want to be human,” when engaged in prolonged chat sessions. Microsoft says this happens usually after 15 or more questions where the model becomes confused.

The new Bing chat preview can be seen even on a MacBook.
Photo by Alan Truly

Microsoft’s blog post reads, “This is a non-trivial scenario that requires a lot of prompting so most of you won’t run into it, but we are looking at how to give you more fine-tuned control.”

Recommended Videos

Even with the issues, Microsoft says 71% of users in the first week used the “thumbs up” feature of Bing Chat, indicating they received a helpful answer. Microsoft says this “healthy engagement” comes up even when multiple questions are asked during a chat session.

In the future, Microsoft is looking at a few changes. First, it’s increasing training data for factual information, such as financial reports, by four times. It’s also looking at adding a toggle to the interface that allows you to control if responses are precise or creative. In addition, Microsoft is addressing technical issues and bugs that have been reported by users through daily updates.

Bing Chat comes on the heels of Microsoft’s multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, the open-source company behind the popular ChatGPT app. Bing Chat integrated an enhanced version of ChatGPT, which can access recent information through search results instead of relying solely on pre-trained data.

More than 1 million people signed up to join the waitlist in the first 48 hours, and Microsoft says multiple million have joined since. New users are being added daily, so if you’ve signed up, make sure to keep an eye on your inbox.

Google is also working on its rival AI. Google Bard promises capabilities similar to Bing Chat, but Google hasn’t released it to the public yet. It’s still in testing, but a rollout is expected soon.

Jacob Roach
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Jacob Roach is the lead reporter for PC hardware at Digital Trends. In addition to covering the latest PC components, from…
Your politeness toward ChatGPT is increasing OpenAI’s energy costs 
ChatGPT's Advanced Voice Mode on a smartphone.

Everyone’s heard the expression, “Politeness costs nothing,” but with the advent of AI chatbots, it may have to be revised.

Just recently, someone on X wondered how much OpenAI spends on electricity at its data centers to process polite terms like “please” and “thank you” when people engage with its ChatGPT chatbot.

Read more
Fun things to ask ChatGPT now that it remembers everything
ChatGPT on a laptop

If you hadn't heard, ChatGPT's memory just got a whole lot better. Rolled out across the world to Plus and Pro users over the past few days, ChatGPT's various models can now reference almost any past conversation you had. It doesn't remember everything word for word, but can pull significant details, themes, and important points of reference from just about anything you've ever said to it.

It feels a little creepy at times, but ChatGPT can now be used for much more personalized tasks. OpenAI pitches this as a way to improve its scheduling feature to use it as a personal assistant, or to help you continue longer chats over extended periods of time. But it's also quite fun to see what ChatGPT can tell you by trawling throughh all your chatlogs. It's often surprising some of the answers it spits out in response.

Read more
ChatGPT now interprets photos better than an art critic and an investigator combined
OpenAI press image

ChatGPT's recent image generation capabilities have challenged our previous understanding of AI-generated media. The recently announced GPT-4o model demonstrates noteworthy abilities of interpreting images with high accuracy and recreating them with viral effects, such as that inspired by Studio Ghibli. It even masters text in AI-generated images, which has previously been difficult for AI. And now, it is launching two new models capable of dissecting images for cues to gather far more information that might even fail a human glance.

OpenAI announced two new models earlier this week that take ChatGPT's thinking abilities up a notch. Its new o3 model, which OpenAI calls its "most powerful reasoning model" improves on the existing interpretation and perception abilities, getting better at "coding, math, science, visual perception, and more," the organization claims. Meanwhile, the o4-mini is a smaller and faster model for "cost-efficient reasoning" in the same avenues. The news follows OpenAI's recent launch of the GPT-4.1 class of models, which brings faster processing and deeper context.

Read more