Recently, users of Microsoft’s Bing search engine began to notice that artificial intelligence sometimes responds to the name “Sidney” (Sidney), or instead interrupts the conversation when the name “internal” is mentioned. The company said that Sidney is a chat bot that was tested before the arrival of ChatGPT.
Caitlin Rawlston, Microsoft’s director of communications, spoke about this in an interview with The Verge. The company “bet big” on chatbots in 2016, three years before investing $1 billion in artificial intelligence developer OpenAI, according to a senior executive.
Sidney is the code name of a chatbot with functionality similar to the current version of Bing with integrated ChatGPT. Microsoft has begun testing “Sydney” in a limited number of countries.
We started testing [Sidney] in India at the end of 2020,” Roulston said. “The insights we gained helped shape our work with the new Bing preview.”
“This is experimental chat on Bing.com using artificial intelligence,” read a warning on the 2021 interface. According to The Verge, some users in India and China noticed Sidney in early 2021.
Microsoft began testing basic chatbots on Bing in 2017. Early versions used artificial intelligence technologies previously used in Office.
According to the publication’s sources, versions of the chatbot until the end of last year were much less individual. The arrival of ChatGPT was a breakthrough, as it made the dream of the conversational search query company, which I had been working on for over six years, come true.
Jorge Ribas, Microsoft’s head of search and artificial intelligence, said the new AI capabilities were “the culmination of years of work by the Bing team,” which includes “other innovations” to be announced at a later date.
Bloomberg previously noted that the Bing chatbot can stop communicating when requests are about your feelings or the name Sidney used by the search engine’s development team.
Photo: Unsplash
Author:
Ahmed Sadulayev
Source: RB
I am a professional journalist and content creator with extensive experience writing for news websites. I currently work as an author at Gadget Onus, where I specialize in covering hot news topics. My written pieces have been published on some of the biggest media outlets around the world, including The Guardian and BBC News.
