Microsoft promised last week to update Bing Chat, the AI powered chatbot featured in the new Bing. The update comes in part to mitigate issues highlighted by a number of journalists and researchers, where Bing Chat either “hallucinated” and gave incorrect answers, or failed to repond at all. According to Mikhail Parakhin, the CEO of Advertising and Web Services at Microsoft, while it took a bit longer than expected, those changes are now in “full production” and available to everyone:
OK, it took longer than we initially expected, but finally Bing Chat v96 is fully in production. Give it a try! Now, onto fully shipping the tri-toggle…
— Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) February 28, 2023
Parakhin then notes the two main improvements are:
– Significant reduction in cases where Bing refuses to reply for no apparent reason
– Reduced instances of hallucination in answers
While these improvements should be available to anyone accepted into the preview, there’s still more to come. Microsoft is still working on the “tri-toggle,” or Bing Chat Mode Selector, which will allow users to choose between Bing Chat’s “tones:”
We are also going to begin testing an additional option that lets you choose the tone of the Chat from more Precise – which will focus on shorter, more search focused answers – to Balanced, to more Creative – which gives you longer and more chatty answers. The goal is to give you more control on the type of chat behavior to best meet your needs.
Parakhin says that Microsoft has settled on a final version for the “tri-toggle,” and expects the new feature to ship in the next couple of days.