A MERE MONTH after investing $10 billion in OpenAI—the developer of DALL-E and ChatGPT—Microsoft has added an AI chatbot to Bing and has plans to add it to a Sidebar in its Edge browser too. Currently, the new AI Bing is available as a limited preview, which illustrates it at work on a dozen example questions. You can also join a waiting list for fuller access.
It can write poems, help plan holidays, write code, and make a pretty good attempt at intelligent conversation. It’s eerie. The Bing version has been customized for search results, enabling you to easily refine your criteria, saving you from wading through too many answers.
Since this is an AI chatbot on the Internet, obviously some people tried to make it spiral into disturbing or confusing replies. Previous chatbots have proven fragile in this regard. When pushed, things can get bizarre, from insisting that the year is 2022, to getting unduly personal or expressing unsettling desires. Microsoft was forced to limit the number of questions on a topic, as the more there are, the further things can spiral.
Naturally, Google didn’t take long to announce it had launched a rival called Bard, which it had been working on for years. The public reveal of Bard by Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, was rushed and contained an embarrassing error when it managed to get an easily-verifiable fact wrong. Bard has been made available to ‘trusted testers’ and is expected to reach the general public in a few weeks.