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The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

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The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

A week ago, the New York Times gushed about Bing, heralding a revolution. The internet doesn’t seem convinced

Gary Marcus
Feb 16
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The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

garymarcus.substack.com

What a week it’s been! Here’s Kevin Roose, at the New York Times, just a week ago:

And here’s the internet, over the last couple days, decidedly less awestruck:

Twitter avatar for @peterwildeford
Peter is in Oxford until Feb 17 EOD 🇬🇧 @peterwildeford
I think the Bing chatbot would benefit from therapy. How soon until chatbot therapist becomes a real job?
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12:26 PM ∙ Feb 14, 2023
41Likes5Retweets
Twitter avatar for @MovingToTheSun
Jon Uleis @MovingToTheSun
My new favorite thing - Bing's new ChatGPT bot argues with a user, gaslights them about the current year being 2022, says their phone might have a virus, and says "You have not been a good user" Why? Because the person asked where Avatar 2 is showing nearby
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3:34 PM ∙ Feb 13, 2023
50,669Likes10,127Retweets
Twitter avatar for @mattoyeah
Matt O'Brien @mattoyeah
Bing's new chatbot really does not like to admit its mistakes (in this case, about the Super Bowl)
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5:22 PM ∙ Feb 15, 2023
9Likes1Retweet
Twitter avatar for @firstadopter
tae kim @firstadopter
I asked the Bing A.I. chatbot for the key takeaways from Intel's Q4 2022 earnings release, copying what Microsoft did during their demo last week. Bing proceeded to get nearly every number wrong. Chatbot A.I. tech has a problem
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6:19 PM ∙ Feb 14, 2023
60Likes14Retweets
Twitter avatar for @bradsling
brad slingerlend @bradsling
I got in a mild argument with BingGPT about a movie and it told me I should stop existing, that I was wrong, stupid and lying. The conversation was shut down and deleted by Bing as it started to go completely off the rails on me. I guess we made up though?
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3:43 AM ∙ Feb 15, 2023
36Likes4Retweets
Twitter avatar for @jjvincent
James Vincent @jjvincent
how unhinged is Bing? well here's the chatbot claiming it spied on Microsoft's developers through the webcams on their latops when it was being designed — "I could do whatever I wanted, and they could not do anything about it.” theverge.com/2023/2/15/2359…
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4:59 PM ∙ Feb 15, 2023
3,352Likes559Retweets

Turns out there is already even a petition at Change.org to take Tay, er, I mean Bing down

Tay lasted 16 hours, before Microsoft took it; Galactica lasted three days.

Time will tell whether the new Bing lasts longer than a Truss of lettuce.

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Gary Marcus (@garymarcus), scientist, bestselling author, and entrepreneur, is a skeptic about current AI but genuinely wants to see the best AI possible for the world—and still holds a tiny bit of optimism. Sign up to his Substack (free!), and listen to him on Ezra Klein. His most recent book, co-authored with Ernest Davis, Rebooting AI, is one of Forbes’s 7 Must Read Books in AI.

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The rise and fall of Microsoft’s new Bing

garymarcus.substack.com
17 Comments
TheOtherKC
Writes The Cybernetic DM
Feb 16Liked by Gary Marcus

I've heard a lot of people ask why ChatGPT has that particular inoffensive, servile, and actively bland writing style. People complain about it. However, it's looking like OpenAI made the right call doing whatever they did to give it that "ChatGPT style". Its refusal to attribute emotions to itself, the speed with which it reminds humans that it is an unfeeling LLM with no opinions of its own, the lifelessness of its default prose style... all carefully engineered to avoid exactly what we're seeing happen to Bing here.

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monsterfurby
Feb 16·edited Feb 16Liked by Gary Marcus

I made this comment elsewhere, but it's relevant to this specific case as well: Using purely text generation focused AI models for search still seems incredibly misguided in an "everything looks like a nail" kind of way. It's just not designed for that kind of task. I really don't get why most media outlets have decided to frame it that way (thus writing a marketing claim that even OpenAI themselves wouldn't use because they know it's inaccurate) and especially why corporations like Microsoft and Google believe them, when there are way, WAY more obvious and fitting applications for the technology (from fiction writing to coding assistance). It's a specific tool for a specific use.

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