Microsoft Acknowledges Feedback on its New Bing AI Chatbot

Since Microsoft made its new AI-powered Bing available in a limited preview last week, the company said that it has expanded its availability in over 169 countries, with “millions” of enthusiasts still on the waitlist. Yesterday, the company also reflected on what it has learned from this first week of public testing. As you can expect, there’s some good and bad.

First of all, Microsoft said that it has seen “increased engagement” across the board, with 71% of users giving the new AI-powered answers a thumbs up. “You are giving good marks on the citations and references that underly the answers in Bing,” the company added.

Microsoft has also received good feedback on Bing’s new chat experience and content creation capabilities. “One area where we are learning a new use-case for chat is how people are using it as a tool for more general discovery of the world, and for social entertainment. This is a great example of where new technology is finding product-market-fit for something we didn’t fully envision,” the company explained.

However, Microsoft also acknowledged that its Bing AI chatbot wasn’t doing so well with queries that include timely data or numbers, giving sports scores and financial reports as an example. “We’re planning to 4x increase the grounding data we send to the model. Lastly, we’re considering adding a toggle that gives you more control on the precision vs creativity of the answer to tailor to your query,” Microsoft said yesterday.

The company also admitted that its AI chatbot can provide repetitive or unhelpful answers after users ask it 15 or more questions. “Very long chat sessions can confuse the model on what questions it is answering and thus we think we may need to add a tool so you can more easily refresh the context or start from scratch,” Microsoft explained. In a rare scenario, Bing can also answer questions in the tone used by the tester, which can lead to unexpected results.

There have been a lot of different reports pointing out the imperfections of Bing’s AI model since last week, but Microsoft said that it’s “thankful” for all the feedback that’s coming. “We are committed to daily improvement and giving you the absolute best search/answer/chat/create experience possible,” the company said.