Microsoft made a few more tweaks to its Bing AI, increasing some chat limits and making changes to one of the chatbot's personalities.
Chats have now been expanded to allow up to 15 sessions per day, with the maximum session length increased to 10 requests (meaning a total of 150 requests is now your daily limit).
Microsoft has been slowly but surely pushing these chat limits since the first release of the AI and was severely limited (to 5 sessions and 50 requests per day) when the chatbot's behavior was seriously observed during longer sessions.
But the most interesting change, as revealed by Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president and chief consumer marketing officer at Microsoft, is the "Balanced" personality optimization for better performance.
Two updates: Bing Chat limits movement to 15/150. The precise and creative modes remain unchanged, bringing a diversity of experiences. Tell us what you think. March 13, 2023
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As you may know, there are three personalities available for Microsoft AI. Balanced is the middle setting for the chatbot, somewhere in the middle between Accurate and Creative, which remains unchanged.
Precise offers more concise and professional answers, closer to a standard search, while Creative gives the AI more freedom in its answers, with Balanced in the middle as a middle option.
Analysis: accurate, slightly less accurate and creative?
As with any commitment, deciding exactly where to draw the line can be tricky business. However, it looks like Microsoft is shifting that line to a more conservative stance with this latest change.
With Balanced now giving "shorter, faster responses", this clearly seems more in keeping with the Precise setting, rather than Creative, where the AI is given more freedom to move and, frankly, to be more interesting and human.
So moving the balanced dial more towards the conservative end of the spectrum could be seen as making Bing AI a bit more direct and, well, boring.
The point of having all three personalities is to give users a choice in how the AI will respond, so that if they are not satisfied with their interactions with the ChatGPT-powered entity, they can change things around. But now there seems to be a little less choice in terms of the "very conservative" setting, the "somewhat conservative" option, and the "looser" option.
Why did Microsoft take this direction? Our guess is that people who want a more human chat experience use Creative and might not dream of diving into Balanced anyway. Perhaps not many people use Balanced in general, so setting it to Precise may entice those on the latter to use the middle option, while those on Creative will stick with it, most likely, because they want the AI be as interesting and open as inhumanely (ahem) as possible.
Either way, we can expect more tweaks and probably more personality options in the future. We may even get a mode where Bing AI can impersonate famous celebrities too, if the leaks are in the money. And that would probably help to further increase the number of users, when there are already a good number of people registered to test the chatbot.
Through MS Power User (opens in a new tab)