Curious to see what all the hype is about Bing’s chatbot? You don’t have to wait any longer. Microsoft generally opens its doors to everyone after the initial waiting period. While you still technically have to join the waiting list to be admitted to the “new Bing,” the wait time has been reduced to almost no time at all.
Bing was one of the first, and certainly the highest, introduction of generative AI to many consumers. And while the technology is glitchy and sometimes prone to “hallucinations” (an AI term for when chatbots go off the rails and become locked in actions such as insisting on inaccurate information or trying to persuade users to leave their partner), it has certainly attracted attention society.
On Wednesday, Microsoft confirmed that Bing has been using GPT-4, the newly announced, more powerful successor to the initial chatbot, for the past five weeks.
“If you’ve used the new Bing preview at any time in the past five weeks, you’ve experienced an early version of this powerful model,” the company said in a blog post. “As OpenAI makes updates for GPT-4 and beyond, Bing benefits from these improvements.”
GPT-4 has impressed AI observers, with accomplishments including passing a simulated Bar exam, scoring in the top 10% of LSAT test takers and coding a website based on a model it draws.
“We spent 6 months making GPT-4 more secure and more compliant,” OpenAI said when announcing the upgrade. “GPT-4 is 82% more likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40% more likely to produce factual responses than GPT-3.5 in our internal evaluation.”
Bing might be the best way for people to test drive GPT-4 themselves. Currently on the OpenAI website, the new version of the chatbot is only open to developers and subscribers of the $20 monthly Chat GPT Plus program.