Microsoft rolling out Bing Chat v98 with less refusals, and reduced disengagement

Microsoft’s Bing Chat team isn’t taking time off this week as Easter weekend approaches. Early this morning, Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s head of Advertising and Web Services, posted on his Twitter account that v98 of Bing Chat should start rolling out today. The company released v96 back on February 28.

Starting to ship Prompt v98 today: it is a two-stage process, by tomorrow you should see big reduction in the number of cases when Bing Chat refuses to create something (write code, for example). Then the second stage will be deployed, reducing disengagements.

— Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) April 5, 2023

In his post, Parakhin stated the release of Bing Chat v98 will be in two stages. The first stage is designed to give Bing Chat users large reductions “in the number of cases when Bing Chat refuses to create something”according to Parakhin. The second stage will then roll out which should cut back on the chatbot’s disengagements.

Parakhin also responded to some messages from Twitter users. One complained that the recent release of the Bing Image Creator was still “very restrictive”in terms of making AI-generated art. Parakhin replied, “Also rapidly improving – it is much better than when we first released it.”

Another user stated that Bing Chat in its Creative mode was not working correctly, offering incorrect answers to questions. Parakhin stated, “

Sorry about that. We are trying to have faster responses: have two pathways in the model, run the fast one, check if the answer is good, if not – run the slower pathway. In this case it decided incorrectly that the additional wait is unwarranted: -(We’ll fix it.

He later expanded on that answer, stating:

Our push is to try to bring the best user experience to everyone. It’s not like we are holding back – the case above wasn’t to save capacity, it was an attempt to speed up the Creative mode without regressing on quality. We are not perfect. Yet: -)

The Bing Chat team was busy last week with some new improvements and features, including expanding its daily and per-session chat turn limits, and adding a way to search for images and video inside the chat dialog.