Microsoft recently launched ‘new’ Bing with ChatGPT. And earlier this week, the company started rolling out early access to waitlist users. Soon after using Bing’s new capabilities, a lot of users reported that Bing was returning ‘inaccurate’ answers to their queries. The company has now responded to the criticism while highlighting that user feedback is necessary for the development of the tool “at this nascent stage.”
In a blog post, Microsoft said that very long sessions with the AI chat-enabled Bing may confuse the model on what questions it is answering. “We think we may need to add a tool so you can more easily refresh the context or start from scratch,” the company explained.
As per the Windows maker, the language model at times “tries to respond or reflect in the tone in which it is being asked” to provide responses. This can lead to a style users did not intend.
“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,” Microsoft said, adding that there have been a few 2 hour chat sessions with Bing.
It also said that in long, extended chat sessions of 15 or more questions, Bing can become repetitive or be prompted/provoked to give responses that are not necessarily helpful or in line with our designed tone.
Positive feedback for ‘new’ Bing
While noting the criticism received, Microsoft also says that it has been testing new Bing with a select set of people in over 169 countries to get real-world feedback. It said that the platform saw an increased engagement across traditional search results and with the new features like summarised answers, the new chat experience, and the content creation tools.
“In particular, feedback on the answers generated by the new Bing has been mostly positive with 71% of you giving the AI-powered answers a ‘thumbs up.’ We’re seeing a healthy engagement on the chat feature with multiple questions asked during a session to discover new information,” the company said.
What is Microsoft doing to make Bing better
Microsoft highlights that the “only way to improve Bing” is that people continue to use the product and do “exactly what you all are doing.” However, it says that the teams are working in some areas so that Bing responds with better search and answers.
“For queries where you are looking for more direct and factual answers such as numbers from financial reports, we’re planning to 4x increase the grounding data we send to the model. We’re also considering adding a toggle that gives you more control on the precision vs creativity of the answer to tailor to your query,” Microsoft said.
