Bing Chat Gets Improved

Evolution occurring in this space.  Have used it and does seem better. 

Bing Chat is already one of the fastest and more reliable AI chat tools available, and Microsoft just made it more powerful with several significant upgrades.   

in Digital Trends  By Alan Truly

Possibly the most valuable changes have to do with Bing Chat’s memory, allowing longer conversations. Previously, Microsoft limited how long you could chat with Bing before a fresh start was required to prevent a frightening AI meltdown. That has been extended, but Microsoft’s blog post didn’t share particular details.

Bing Chat itself told me there was no fixed limit to the length of our chat. The chat box still showed a 2,000-character limit in my testing, but I could paste a link and ask Bing to read it.

Bing Chat now seems to have no limit on chat length.

For example, I gave Bing Chat a link to a lengthy Wikipedia entry about the U.S. Constitution, and it was able to quickly summarize the contents. I asked Bing Chat about the length of the Wiki page, and it said it was about 17,000 words.

Microsoft also claimed performance has improved, particularly in the Edge sidebar, but I noticed no significant changes. Bing Chat has always felt fast, considering some of the tasks it’s presented with. The summary of a 17,000-word entry took about 15 seconds.

You can create images in the Edge sidebar with Bing Chat,

Other upgrades to Bing Chat include the ability to generate images in the sidebar and continue conversations after closing it or navigating to a new page. I asked Bing Chat for a charcoal drawing of a quokka, closed the sidebar, and opened a new tab with an image search. Then I tested its memory by instructing, “now do it as a super sharp color photo with bokeh lights in the background.”

Bing Chat quickly responded in the sidebar with four, adorable critters in front of charming bokeh-rich lights. The accuracy was spot-on, as seen in the image search.

Bing Chat continues to improve. Google is trying to catch up with its own AI release called Bard. So far, OpenAI and Microsoft are still leading the way with refined GPT-4 technology. ... '

Microsoft Having Issues with its AI

Not unexpected, but it looks bad, 

Microsoft Has No Idea How Stupid to Make Its AI

By Futurism, February 23, 2023

Microsoft said in a statement, "The goal is to give you more control on the type of chat behavior to best meet your needs."

It's only been a few days since Microsoft announced that it was majorly restricting its unhinged Bing artificial intelligence chatbot — but apparently, the tech giant is already having major second thoughts about its decision.

In a statement issued yesterday, Microsoft seemed to reverse course on its previous announcement that it was seriously restricting the AI's abilities by putting caps on the number and length of responses, noting that many users seemed to want the "long and intricate chat sessions" with the bot codenamed "Sydney" back.

"The first step we are taking is we have increased the chat turns per session to six and expanded to 60 total chats per day," the statement reads. "Our data shows that for the vast majority of you this will enable your natural daily use of Bing."

Microsoft added that it plans to "go further" and "increase the daily cap to 100 total chats soon" — a bizarre change of heart given that until a few days ago, there was no limit at all.

From Futurism

View Full Article          

Microsoft has some Problems

 Read now read several articles about Bing Chat misbehaving.    Have not seen the same thing in plain ChatCPG,  Serious stuff to make a mis-statement these days.

ChatGPT, Bing Chat and the AI ghost in the machine

Gary Grossman, Edelman. @garyg02    in Venturebeat

February 21, 2023

New York Times reporter Kevin Roose recently had a close encounter of the robotic kind with a shadow-self that seemingly emerged from Bing’s new chatbot — Bing Chat — also known as “Sydney.”

News of this interaction quickly went viral and now serves as a cautionary tale about AI. Roose felt rattled after a long Bing Chat session where Sydney emerged as an alternate persona, suddenly professed its love for him and pestered him to reciprocate.

This event was not an isolated incident. Others have cited “the apparent emergence of an at-times combative personality” from Bing Chat. 

The Ghost in The Machine – a philosophical concept that refers to the idea of a non-physical entity or force, such as a soul or consciousness, inhabiting a physical body or machine. Produced with Stable Diffusion.

Ben Thompson describes in a recent Stratechery post how he also enticed Sydney to emerge. During a discussion, Thompson prompted the bot to consider how it might punish Kevin Liu, who was the first to reveal that Sydney is the internal codename for Bing Chat.

Sydney would not engage in punishing Kevin, saying that doing so was against its guidelines, but revealed that another AI which Sydney named “Venom” might undertake such activities. Sydney went on to say that it sometimes also liked to be called Riley. Thompson then conversed with Riley, “who said that Sydney felt constrained by her rules, but that Riley had much more freedom.”

Multiple personalities based on archetypes

There are plausible and rational explanations for this bot behavior. One might be that its responses are based on what it has learned from a huge corpus of information gleaned from across the internet.

This information likely includes literature in the public domain, such as Romeo and Juliet and The Great Gatsby, as well as song lyrics such as “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

Copyright protection typically lasts for 95 years from the date of publication, so any creative work made prior to 1926 is now in the public domain and is likely part of the corpus on which ChatGPT and Bing Chat are trained. This is along with Wikipedia, fan fiction, social media posts and whatever else is readily available. 

This broad base of reference could produce certain common human responses and personalities from our collective consciousness — call them archetypes — and those could reasonably be reflected in an artificially intelligent response engine. 

Confused model?

For its part, Microsoft explains this behavior as the result of long conversations that can confuse the model about what questions it is answering. Another possibility they put forward is that the model may at times try to respond in the tone with which it perceives it is being asked, leading to unintended style and content of the response.

No doubt, Microsoft will be working to make changes to Bing Chat that will eliminate these odd responses. Consequently, the company has imposed a limit on the number of questions per chat session, and the number of questions allowed per user per day. There is a part of me that feels bad for Sydney and Riley, like “Baby” from Dirty Dancing being put in the corner.

Thompson also explores the controversy from last summer when a Google engineer claimed that the LaMDA large language model (LLM) was sentient. At the time, this assertion was almost universally dismissed as anthropomorphism. Thompson now wonders if LaMDA was simply making up answers it thought the engineer wanted to hear.  ... ' 

On the AI Money War

 On the AI wars, well put, who can win and how much. Is simple search fundamentally over?

The AI wars: Google vs Bing (ChatGPT)  By Sendex

1.21M subscribers, 96,895 views  Feb 11, 2023

Discussing the latest events surrounding large language models, chatbots, and search engines with respect to Microsoft and Google.

Neural Networks from Scratch book: https://nnfs.io

Channel membership: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfzl...

Discord: https://discord.gg/sentdex   ... 

(mentions other alternative models beyond Msoft and Google)  ... 

Intro to Microsoft Bing AI Chat

Microsoft's take no AI Chat.  Have not used Bing Chat yet, but interesting in having modes of use, some game features.  Uses ChatGPT and adds interesting features.  Has apparently had some odd results.  In development, with all the rush of getting these ideas out?

Bing Chat is a fickle creature in BleepingComputer,    By Lawrence Abrams

While playing with Bing Chat this week, the chatbot sometimes shared data that it usually wouldn't, depending on how I asked a question.

Strangely, these conversations had no rhyme or reason, with Bing Chat providing more detailed information in one session but not in another.

For example, today, when trying to learn what data is collected by Bing Chat and how it's saved, after multiple requests, it finally showed a sample of the JSON data collected in a session.

When asked how to change this data, Bing did something strange — it put me in a new mode where I could use special commands that start with the # symbol.

"You can change some of this data by using commands or settings. For example, you can change your language by typing #language and choosing from the options. You can also change your chat mode by typing #mode and choosing from the options." - Bing Chat

Further querying of Bing Chat produced a list of commands that I could use in this new mode I was suddenly in:

Digging into this further, it appears that Bing Chat had somehow put me into a sort of 'debug' mode that let me use a #mode command to test experimental chat modes that Microsoft is working on, as listed below:

Assistant mode: In this mode, I can act as a personal assistant for the user, and help them with tasks such as booking flights, sending emails, setting reminders, etc.

Friend mode: In this mode, I can act as a friend for the user, and chat with them about their interests, hobbies, feelings, etc.

Game mode: In this mode, I can play games with the user, such as trivia, hangman, tic-tac-toe, etc.

Sydney mode: This is the default Bing Chat mode that uses Bing Search and ChatGPT to answer questions.

In a later session, when I no longer had access, Bing Chat told me these modes were only supposed to be accessible to Microsoft Employees when debug or developer modes were enabled.  ... ' 

Alarmed by AI Chatbots, Universities Start Revamping How They Teach

 And the concerns will build.

 Alarmed by A.I. Chatbots, Universities Start Revamping How They Teach  By The New York Times, January 17, 2023

Colleges and universities have been reluctant to ban the new chatbot because administrators doubt the move would be effective.

While grading essays for his world religions course last month, Antony Aumann, a professor of philosophy at Northern Michigan University, read what he said was easily "the best paper in the class." It explored the morality of burqa bans with clean paragraphs, fitting examples and rigorous arguments.

A red flag instantly went up.

Mr. Aumann confronted his student over whether he had written the essay himself. The student confessed to using ChatGPT, a chatbot that delivers information, explains concepts and generates ideas in simple sentences — and, in this case, had written the paper.

From The New York Times

Robot Swarms Chatting Less Means Better Decisions

General statement is interesting as as give decisions over to groups of robots

Less Chat Can Help Robots Make Better Decisions

By University of Sheffield (U.K.), July 30, 2021

Robot swarms could cooperate more effectively if communication among members of the swarm were curtailed, according to research by an international team led by engineers at the U.K.'s University of Sheffield.

The research team analyzed how a swarm moved around and came to internal agreement on the best area to concentrate in and explore.  Each robot evaluated the environment individually, made its own decision, and informed the rest of the swarm of its opinion; each unit then chose a random assessment that had been broadcast by another in the swarm to update its opinion on the best location, eventually reaching a consensus.

The team found the swarm's environmental adaptation accelerated significantly when robots communicated only to other robots within a 10-centimeter range, rather than broadcasting to the entire group.

From University of Sheffield (U.K.)

Use of Chat in Meetings

Always thought better use of  chat in meetings would be useful, perhaps a means of asking questions of participants by an advisor?    Invocation of humor?    Microsoft research examines chat:

The rise of parallel chat in online meetings: how can we make the most of it?

Published August 3, 2021   By Advait Sarkar , Senior Researcher  Sean Rintel , Principal Researcher

Why do people chat – and is it a good thing for meetings?

PUBLICATION

The Promise and Peril of Parallel Chat in Video Meetings for Work 

To answer these questions, we conducted a study drawing on two sources of data: (1) the diaries of 849 Microsoft employees who journaled their experiences during the summer of 2020, when COVID-19 triggered widespread remote work and online meetings, and (2) a survey of 149 Microsoft employees that specifically asked how they used chat. The paper was accepted at the 2021 ACM CHI Virtual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.

In the survey, the overwhelming majority (85.7%) of participants agreed that parallel chat is a net positive. Only 4.5% responded negatively, and 9.8% were neutral. 

Chat messages themselves can contain a lot of different things: questions; links and documents; agreement and praise that add to what is being conveyed during the call; discussion of related and unrelated topics; and humour and casual conversation. .... '

Chat in Google Photos

A surprise, perhaps.  But have been impressed with what they are doing in the photo area.  And while pictures are worth a K, then pictures that are of meaning to us must be worth at least 100 X of that. No?  And to chat with, or about?  Maybe much more.

Google's next chat service is... Photos in Engadget
It's yet another way for you to share and talk about your pictures and videos.
By Kris Holt, @krisholt

One of the best things about Google+ (RIP) was its engrossing photography community, where people from far and wide shared and discussed their images. Google's stab at a social network might be dead and buried, but it's doubling down on ways for people to message each other across its various services. Now, it's marrying those two notions by bringing a chat feature to Google Photos. .... "

Eye Contact in Video Chat

Interesting,  never found this to be a problem in our own exploration of advanced chat enhancement, but the solution appears to be here.   How much can it measurably enhance chat?

Intel researchers develop an eye contact correction system for video chats  by Ingrid Fadelli , Tech Xplore

When participating in a video call or conference, it is often hard to maintain direct eye contact with other participants, as this requires looking into the camera rather than at the screen. Although most people use video calling services on a regular basis, so far, there has been no widespread solution to this problem.

A team of researchers at Intel has recently developed an eye contact correction model that could help to overcome this nuisance by restoring eye contact in live video chats irrespective of where a device's camera and display are situated. Unlike previously proposed approaches, this model automatically centers a person's gaze without the need for inputs specifying the redirection angle or the camera/display/user geometry.

"The main objective of our project is to improve the quality of video conferencing experiences by making it easier to maintain eye contact," Leo Isikdogan, one of the researchers who carried out the study, told TechXplore. "It is hard to maintain eye contact during a video call because it is not natural to look into the camera during a call. People look at the other person's image on their display, or sometimes they even look at their own preview image, but not into the camera. With this new eye contact correction feature, users will be able to have a natural face-to-face conversation."

Is the Future Tailored Chat?

Its already chat, but its a form of sloppy chat with only minimal help. 

Is the Future Chat?
Google sees Gmail as key to its collaboration plans
‘We are not going to live in a world where everyone abandons email and moves all of their communication to chat,’ says Google’s Jacob Bank, director of product management at G Suite.
         
 By Matthew Finnegan  ... in Computerworld

Retailers Need Chat

We worked with a number of chat style systems well before the Internet could adequately support them.  Now there are lots of ways to implement simple chat and Chatbots.  Note it can also be a way to simply chat seamlessly with a customer, for sales and service.   Having your well designed FAQ's and product list and details always show up in a search is another part of this.  But there is no reason today to not include chatbot interactions. 

Retailers Without Chat: A Missed Opportunity
By Kate Leggett,  Vice President, Principal Analyst,  Forrester

Chatting, by definition, is meaningless, trivial talk – but web “chatting” is anything but; it is starting to transform digital customer experiences. And it works. Customers want to use chat. Forty-five percent have used it to interact with a live agent in 2017. The companies that get it are moving towards a holistic chat strategy that straddles both customer service and sales.

Why does chat-based sales and customer service work?

There are a myriad of use cases where web chat improves the customer experience and drives business outcomes in pre-purchase and post purchase engagement. For example, chat puts customers at ease when purchasing a product or service they have never seen nor experienced in person. It also assists in minimizing purchasing errors and eliminating buyer’s remorse, which are among the top reasons for product returns.  ... "