Curious to see what all the hype is about with Bing’s chatbot? You no longer have to wait. Microsoft has largely opened the doors to everyone after an initial waiting period. While you’ll still have to technically join a waiting list to be admitted into the “new Bing,” the wait time has been reduced to virtually no time.
Bing was one of the first, and certainly highest-profile, introductions to generative A.I. for many consumers. And while the technology has been glitchy and sometimes prone to “hallucinations” (an A.I. term for when the chatbots go off the rails and become locked in to actions such as insisting inaccurate information is correct or trying to seduce users to leave their spouse), it has certainly caught the public’s attention.
On Wednesday, Microsoft confirmed Bing has been using GPT-4, the newly announced, much more robust successor to the initial chatbot, for the past five weeks.
“If you’ve used the new Bing preview at any time in the last five weeks, you’ve already experienced an early version of this powerful model,” the company said in a blog post. “As OpenAI makes updates to GPT-4 and beyond, Bing benefits from those improvements.”
GPT-4 has already impressed A.I. observers, with feats including passing a simulated bar exam, earning an LSAT score in the top 10% of test takers and coding a website based off a drawn model.
“We spent six months making GPT-4 safer and more aligned,” said OpenAI when announcing the upgrade. “GPT-4 is 82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40% more likely to produce factual responses than GPT-3.5 on our internal evaluations.”
Bing could 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 of and subscribers to the $20 per month Chat GPT Plus program.
