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Note, as of Friday 17th February 2023 (a fews days after this post was published), Microsoft adjusted several bits of the behaviour of New Bing (putting some restriction on number of daily messages, messages by interaction and apparently some rules to avoid several topics like how the model itself was built (in a way it’s more boring now, but let’s see how long it takes people to find out “jailbreaks” for this. See the two roundups LLM Roundup – 17th February and LLM roundup – 14th Feb 2023 with some more background of the emergent behaviour that Bing was showing
Note #2, follow up post: Should I Bing or should I not?
I got access to New Bing, how I got it, what it looks like
The run-up
Last week, on Tuesday 7th of February, Microsoft announced their first visible product coming from the investment and sort of joint venture with OpenAI. Tagging along the hype of chatGPT, and also snubbing Google’s somewhat failed attempt of a response, MSFT told the world that the search experience was changing with the help of AI and announced “new Bing” and invited people to register to try it.
I did register as soon as I could, and was prompted to do a couple of funny MSFT stuff like downloading the Bing app to my phone (which I found is gamified in itself giving you points in exchange of running searches in the app) and also installing a funny app that changes the wallpaper in my laptop. I wasn’t too keen, but decided to prioritise FOMO and excitement and increase my position in the waitlist (supposedly). Funnily enough, my confirmation e-mail went to spam, in outlook…
Yesterday Sunday 12th, I got my invite to try New Bing. After a couple of funny shenanigans (I have 2 accounts in their systems, one for work, one personal), and the web asking me to download Edge (from where I was actually already browsing!), I finally was able to access New Bing!
What it looks like
They’ve just added a new section below the search bar called Chat (next to Search, and before Images, Videos, Maps, News and More…)
The default result for me is a standard search, with some add-ons that are not chat/AI related, but a prominent Video-first result, and some info from wikihow.com on the right
If you go to the chat tab, the UI changes a bit, and it’s already waiting for you launching the query to some Language Model in the back (GPT 3.5 I guess, but don’t know for sure). And yes, I got 111 points for using search in the Bing app, yay.
This is ok, doesn’t look super AI-ish, but if you start to keep asking, you get similar behaviours to what you got using chatGPT (at least the few things I tried).
So I tried one of the usual chatGPT tricks which is asking it (them? “to anthropomorphize, or not to anthropomorphize, that is a question”) to write a solution to my question in a given literary style, in this case I chose 1850 Charles Dickens.
The story kept going, I don’t think it’s worth repeating it here. A previous try didn’t work very well, I imagine Bing will always first try to give you old-school type of answers, as the GPT answers will be quite expensive to run in comparison. Anyway, it’s not that hard to force a GPT answer playing a bit with the prompt.
I also played around with getting this to generate simple scaffolding for code (like a very basic web app based in Python/Flask that I was able to get up running with Replit in seconds).
I don’t have any grand conclusions yet, other that things are looking very interesting. There are still many questions in the air, and I am sure there will be disappointments. I will write about some of those in different posts, this was just to give a preview of what was launched in the past week (or 2 months+ if we are just talking about chatGPT).
In particular New Bing for now is a good way to avoid constrains in capacity by chatGPT, plus of course the added advantage that it combines fresh internet content (while GPT-3.5, which is the underlying model in chatGPT stops at late 2021). I don’t assume the current flows an usability will be the same in a few months time, and I guess all of those that try it now will help to shape that, indirectly by our uses (and also by measuring how much it’s costing them to run this in the background!)
My recommendation is to get registered ASAP and get to try it by yourselves (both chatGPT and New Bing, and Google’s Bard when it comes). It’s fun and full of possibilities to think about great use cases for this. In a nutshell I currently think these technologies will work to enhance “productivity” of knowledge workers and cognitive/mental activities.
Appendix
I actually thought about getting New Bing to improve the language here, but the first suggestion for the first two paragraphs were funny, almost like coming up from Microsoft’s Marketing team, so I decided to ditch the language improvement this time and kept my original
juan M 
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