Jordi Ribas, Bing’s corporate vice president, said the new Bing “still has problems” and that it is focusing on improving the bot’s capabilities.
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Bing executive Jordi Ribas said Microsoft is focused on improving the new Bing, per The Information.
Ribas’ comment comes after Bing came under fire for spewing unhinged answers to user queries.
Since then, Microsoft has restricted Bing users to five questions per session.
After the new Bing spooked some of its early users with eyebrow-raising answers, a Bing executive told tech news website The Information that Microsoft will prioritize making its conversational AI chatbot better.
Bing’s chatbot, released in early February, has faced accusations that it’s called some of its users delusional, compared an Associated Press reporter to Adolf Hitler, and even professed its love. Some users also said Bing’s responses were also found to contain misinformation.
The Microsoft exec said the company is aware that there’s been some issues.
“It still has problems, but these are problems we’ve known about large-language models and have worked on addressing,” Jordi Ribas, Bing’s corporate vice president, told The Information.
In response to the unsettling exchanges, Bing limited its chatbot interactions last Friday to 50 questions per day and five question-and-answer exchanges per day. Conversations with more than 15 questions can confuse the bot and can sometimes mirror the tone of the user’s queries, Microsoft said in a blog post.
A Microsoft spokesperson didn’t respond to Insider’s request for additional comment ahead of publication.
Ribas’s comment comes as Big Tech giants like Google rush to develop and release powerful AI chatbots. The emerging AI arms race has sparked debate among industry experts and users over whether Bing’s AI launch was a responsible choice.
Dmitri Brereton, an AI and search engine researcher, said that Bing’s chatbot is “definitely not ready for launch” after it made a number of factual errors during its demo. Its release is especially “dangerous,” Brereton said, since millions of users tend to rely on search engines to provide accurate information.
“Bing tries to solve this by warning people the answers are inaccurate,” he told Insider. “But they know and we know that no one is going to listen to that.”
When asked about Bing’s responses, a Microsoft spokesperson told Insider last week that user feedback is necessary to pinpoint flaws in the chatbot so they can be improved.
“It’s important to note that last week we announced a preview of this new experience,” the Microsoft spokesperson said at the time. “We’re expecting that the system may make mistakes during this preview period, and the feedback is critical to help identify where things aren’t working well so we can learn and help the models get better.”
Microsoft isn’t the only company that’s run into issues with its chatbot.
John Hennessy, the chairman of Alphabet, told CNBC that Google is hesitant to release its chatbot — expected to launch in just a few weeks — because its not “really ready for a product yet.” Google employees also said the announcement of the bot, which included an ad containing misinformation, was “botched” and “rushed.”