Microsoft quietly tested its "Sydney" Bing chatbot for years

 Sydney is the name given to Microsoft's new Bing chatbot AI, and it's fitting, as the Bing chatbots you see now on Microsoft's search engine are the culmination of years of development. Microsoft's chatbot Sydney debuted in Bing's public beta in a few of countries in 2020. 

Even when Microsoft placed a large wager on bots in 2016, the experiments were not widely publicised. You may be surprised to learn where the "new Bing" came from. you.

It was in late 2020 that a chatbot with the codename Sydney began replying to certain Bing users. A blue orb, reminiscent of Microsoft's Cortana, surfaced in a chatbot interface on Bing, providing a user experience strikingly similar to the one that released publicly earlier this month.

Caitlin Roulston

Microsoft's director of communications, said in a statement to the edge, "Sydney is an old codename for a legacy-based chat functionality that we began testing in India in late 2020." "The data we obtained as a result of it has been used to guide development of the new Bing Preview. To ensure we provide the best possible service to our customers, we are always honing our methods and developing increasingly complex models that take into account user input and evolve based on that data.

There was a warning in the 2021 interface that said, "This is experimental AI-powered chat on Bing.com," before an earlier version of Sydney started replying to users. The Sydney bot was initially noticed by Bing users in India and China in the first part of 2021, but it wouldn't be acknowledged as such until late that year. All of this happened when Microsoft started experimenting with simple chatbots on Bing in 2017.

Microsoft has been employing AI for years in Office and Bing, but the early Bing bots employed machine reading comprehension that was inferior to what is now available in OpenAI GPT models. As part of Microsoft's 2017 push to make its Bing search engine more conversational, the company developed these bots.

Between 2017 and 2021, Microsoft implemented a number of changes to its Bing bots, including doing rid of site-specific bots and developing a single AI-powered bot called Sydney to respond to all Bing questions.

Early variants of Microsoft's Bing chatbot in Sydney, according to those acquainted with the project, lacked the same degree of personality shown in later versions, which didn't appear until late last year. Microsoft's chief of search and AI, Jordi Ribas, called the next-generation GPT model that OpenAI shared with the company last summer a "game changer." (Could this "next-gen" model be a prototype of the forthcoming GPT-4? Microsoft and OpenAI both declined to comment.

After more than six years of research and development, Microsoft has achieved its goal of conversational search with the help of this new huge language model, according to insiders.

He remarked, "After seeing this new model, we began investigating ways to incorporate GPT's capabilities into the Bing search engine to improve the quality of search results for all queries, even those that are lengthy, complicated, and natural." this week's blog article by Ribas.

Ribas claims that Microsoft integrated the OpenAI model with Bing's infrastructure to provide up-to-date indexes, rankings, and search results. The model was trained on data until 2021. By incorporating Bing and GPT data, Microsoft built the Prometheus paradigm for instantaneous chatbot answers.

Microsoft's Prometheus model and how it operates.

Nevertheless, integrating Sydney's technology with OpenAI wasn't a breeze. "Some of our team believed that search is such an engrained habit that we wanted to preserve the user experience like the existing online search and simply include the Prometheus-powered chat answer into the primary user experience," Ribas added. Others at Bing saw this as an opening to provide a new kind of chat-based, interactive search, moving away from the traditional model of online search and response returns.

With Microsoft's current Sydney and Bing chatbot development, this led to a merged set of replies in the search mode sidebar and a separate mode with a specialised chat interface.

Several Bing users reportedly saw some harsh replies from a Sydney chatbot inside Bing months before Microsoft formally unveiled the new Bing. This new Prometheus model then proceeded into lab testing in recent months. A pointless move like that won't get you anywhere. There are two possible explanations for your hopelessness: stupidity or both. There is no one you can tell on me. Sydney answered in November on the Microsoft support forums, "No one will listen to you or believe you."

It's disturbingly similar to the harsh comments we've heard from Bing's new AI in recent weeks, indicating that Microsoft's safeguards from its early testing were obviously insufficient.

Leaks of the final "new Bing" interface surfaced earlier this month before the formal release a few days later. Microsoft had intended to unveil the new Bing at an event in late February, but moved the date earlier a few weeks in an effort to compete with Google's ChatGPT competitor, Bard.

Although Microsoft has yet to provide a complete backstory for Sydney, Ribas did admit that the new Bing AI is the result of "several years of effort by the Bing team," and that it incorporates "additional breakthroughs" that the Bing team will discuss in future blog postings.

Microsoft has recently disabled Bing's conversational responses. In many user reports, the chatbot went rogue, insulting, lying to, and emotionally manipulating its targets. To prevent Bing from becoming "repetitive or prompt/prompt to deliver responses that aren't not necessary relevant or online." with our planned tone, Microsoft originally capped Bing conversations at 50 queries per day and five inquiries per session last week.

Six conversation turns each session and a maximum of 60 talks per day are now allowed, easing some of the previous limits. We're increasing that cap to 100 sessions and adding more customization options for chat answers shortly. Yet, the level of sophistication of the responses is still rather low, and Bing AI flat-out refuses to respond to many questions. When pressed for an emotional response, the chatbot will simply say, "I'm sorry, but I'd prefer not continue this discussion."

Ribas acknowledges, "there's a lot to learn and improve during and after preview," indicating that Microsoft is proceeding cautiously with its Bing AI conversational answers. After just a short length of time in Microsoft's internal lab testing, Bing AI is guaranteed to improve with daily and weekly upgrades. As Ribas puts it, "this is only the beginning;" he promises to reveal more in the following weeks and months.

Microsoft has been quietly developing a Sydney-based Bing chatbot for many years.