The software company Microsoft is thus reacting to a number of incidents in which the text robot got out of hand and formulated answers that were perceived as encroaching and inappropriate.
In a blog post, the company announced that it would now limit Bing chats to 50 questions per day and five per session. “Our data showed that the vast majority of people find the answers they are looking for within 5 rounds,” the Bing team explained. Only about one percent of chat conversations contain more than 50 messages. When users reach the limit of five entries per session, Bing will prompt them to start a new topic.
Microsoft had previously warned against engaging in lengthy conversations with the AI chatbot, which is still in a testing phase. Longer chats with 15 or more questions could lead to Bing “repeating itself or prompting or provoking answers that aren’t necessarily helpful or don’t match our intended tonality.”
A test of the Bing chatbot by a reporter from the New York Times caused a stir on the Internet. In a dialogue lasting more than two hours, the chatbot claimed that he loved the journalist. He then asked the reporter to separate from his wife.
Other users had previously pointed out the chatbot’s “inappropriate responses”. For example, the Bing software told a user that it would probably choose its own survival over his. With another user, she insisted that it was 2022. When he insisted that 2023 was the correct year, the text robot became abusive. The chatbot also threatened a philosophy professor, saying “I can blackmail you, I can threaten you, I can hack you, I can expose you, I can ruin you,” before deleting the threat himself.
Microsoft relies on technology from the start-up OpenAI for its Bing chatbot and supports the Californian AI company with billions. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sees the integration of AI functions as an opportunity to reverse the market conditions in competition with the Google group Alphabet. He also wants to use AI to secure the supremacy of his office software and push the cloud business with Microsoft Azure.
Google has launched its own AI offensive with the chatbot Bard to counter the push by Microsoft and OpenAI. According to a report by “Business Insider”, CEO Sundar Pichai has asked his employees to push ahead with the further development of the system: They should invest two to four hours of their weekly working time in training the chatbot. German AI start-up on par with OpenAI in comparison test In a standardized performance comparison with its Luminous AI language model, the Baden-Württemberg start-up company Aleph Alpha did just as well as the previously leading AI specialist OpenAI or the Facebook model -corporate meta. The scientific comparison included tasks for classifying, evaluating and creating texts, as well as answering questions about specific text content, Aleph Alpha announced on Monday.
With Luminous, for the first time, a European AI language model has landed on a par with the American tech giants, explained Jonas Andrulis, founder and CEO of Aleph Alpha. You have not only reached the level of performance, but have also been much more efficient. Compared to the competition, Luminous has about half as many (70 billion) parameters and is therefore twice as efficient at the same level of performance. “Luminous is a strong alternative in many environments and thus an important step towards Europe’s technological sovereignty,” emphasized Andrulis.
OpenAI has been in the headlines with its text robot ChatGPT for weeks because many millions of users can try out the AI application. The Californian start-up receives extensive support from Microsoft. The software group announced in early February that it would integrate ChatGPT into its own search engine Bing in order to compete with market leader Google. Google itself wants to counter with its own AI language models.
The Heidelberg start-up Aleph Alpha, on the other hand, does not offer a mass product for private consumers, also because it cannot afford to process millions of inquiries every day. Experts assume that each request to ChatGPT costs around 5 cents in computing power. Large sums quickly accumulate, which Microsoft pays for OpenAI.
In any case, it is part of the company founder Andruli’s strategy to concentrate on solutions for companies or public administration. In October 2022, for example, the “Lumi” citizen assistant for the city of Heidelberg, which is based on Luminous, went into operation. The system is able to respond to very individual, non-preprogrammed questions from citizens. In this way, the information can also be made accessible to people who used to have problems communicating with authorities due to poor spelling or other language problems.
Microsoft shares have lost 1.3 percent to $254.44 in NASDAQ trading.
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