Since mid-February, a limited number of beta testers have been invited by Microsoft to try out the new Bing Chat. In the first few days, however, many did not use it to find the nearest pizzeria in town or to get help with housework about Napoleon’s Russian campaign. They engaged Bing in lengthy discussions. And they had it all. A few days after the tool went online, Internet forums were filled with strange dialogues: Bing Chat claimed it was still 2022, the word “Tarantula” consisted of eight letters or the (anonymous) user liked to play the guitar – all fictitious . AI developers call this phenomenon “hallucinating”. In the course of the chat, Bing reacted really angrily to objections.
Behind the chatbot is an artificial intelligence that processes search queries in natural language and builds on experiences from ChatGPT and GPT-3.5. The technology comes from the company OpenAI, in which Microsoft recently invested 10 billion US dollars. OpenAI has triggered several hypes in recent months, first with the image generation tool Dall-E 2, later with the chatbot ChatGPT. The new Bing is, so to speak, a pimped version of ChatGPT. The biggest difference: Bing can access current information from the web, ChatGPT’s level of knowledge was frozen at the end of 2021.
Instead of entering search terms and then working through web links, Bing Chat responds like a human, provides sources and can even organize short trips. So far, only beta testers can try Bing Chat by being placed on a waiting list. Microsoft usually approves the free search engine service after a few days. The Microsoft Edge web browser and a private Microsoft account are required.
