Microsoft see-sawing Bing AI chatbot's limitations after wild replies to users

Microsoft is seemingly getting nervous about the bizarre and troubling replies being given by its Bing AI chatbot. Last week, the tech giant restricted the number of questions people could ask Bing to five per chat session and 50 total queries per day.

On Tuesday, Microsoft backpedalled a little on the restrictions by allowing six questions per session and 60 questions a day. The company has also promised to gradually increase the limits even more as the platform becomes more stable and better.

"We intend to bring back longer chats and are working hard as we speak on the best way to do this responsibly. The first step we are taking is we have increased the chat turns per session to 6 and expanded to 60 total chats per day. Our data shows that for the vast majority of you this will enable your natural daily use of Bing. That said, our intention is to go further, and we plan to increase the daily cap to 100 total chats soon. In addition, with this coming change your normal searches will no longer count against your chat totals. We will provide you more updates as we continue to make improvements in the model," the company said in a blog post.

Microsoft also explained the Bing AI chatbot's strange behaviour, saying that lengthier conversations could confuse its AI model which would try to imitate the user's tone.

Accuracy Issue

A longer-term issue in the world of AI chatbots is how to shrink the number of parameters in an AI model 10 or even 100 times, without losing accuracy.

"How you cull (parameters away) most effectively, that's still an open question," said Naveen Rao, who formerly ran Intel Corp's AI chip efforts and now works to lower AI computing costs through his startup MosaicML.

In the meantime, some have considered charging for access, like OpenAI's $20 per month subscription for better ChatGPT service. Technology experts also said a workaround is applying smaller AI models to simpler tasks, which Alphabet is exploring.

The company said this month a "smaller model" version of its massive LaMDA AI technology will power its chatbot Bard, requiring "significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users."

Asked about chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard, Hennessy said at a conference called TechSurge last week that more focused models, rather than one system doing everything, would help "tame the cost."

(With Agency inputs)

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