Microsoft announced on Tuesday, February 7, a new version of its Bing search engine, enriched with a conversational robot, version-based enhanced with GPT-3 technology. Developed by the OpenAI company, it is the latter that we find behind the now famous ChatGPT. We don’t know when this enriched Bing will be available to everyone, but its intriguing conversational agent is already accessible to a limited audience: for 48 hours, we were able to bombard with questions this working version of a tool still called upon to evolve. .
What is its exact use? The Bing teams themselves don’t seem to have a very clear idea, describing it on their blog as a “search/answer/discussion/creation experience” and even saying they were surprised to find that users were using it as an instrument of discovery, even entertainment. For the time being, his answers are proving as bluffing as they are embarrassing.
Varying results
Concretely, when you type a request in the new Bing, a window appears on the right of the page: this is where the conversational agent appears. It can be enlarged to the entire screen and used as an assistant (Microsoft prefers to speak of “web co-pilot”), like ChatGPT. The robot can, for example, rephrase a letter full of mistakes with formidable efficiency, but when asked to compose a song, it is much less talented.
On request, he can summarize a text: the result is sometimes surprisingly precise, but also frequently includes factual errors. The robot is also capable of establishing a menu for the week, often respecting the instructions fairly roughly, or of composing the program for a tourist weekend, with sometimes confusing accuracy.
Bing’s chatbot can also be used to search the Internet. He generally refuses divisive questions, but gladly accepts factual questions, such as ChatGPT. His answers then take the form of one to three paragraphs of text, and we can relaunch him with a new question, as if we were discussing with an astonishing “know-it-all”. Or – and this is a novelty – press one of the three buttons which offer additional questions: an incentive to explore the subject in all its richness.
Where ChatGPT knowledge is stuck in 2021, Bing’s built-in robot, besides this basic knowledge, can draw in real time from the Internet. His answers are therefore no longer disconnected from the news. However, they contain very frequent errors, the number of which increases with the complexity of the questions. Microsoft acknowledged on its blog that very hot news, such as live sports results, posed particular difficulties for it. These blunders are difficult to perceive, as the answers are formulated in a credible manner and in an expert tone.
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