- Microsoft may bring Sydney, AKA its once cheeky AI chatbot, back to Bing’s search engine, reports The Verge.
- Microsoft CTO Kevin Scott said Bing may include features that allow users to interact with Sydney.
- The update comes months after Microsoft put restrictions on Bing after users claimed Microsoft’s stance.
The secret, cheeky alias that was once behind Microsoft Bing’s new AI-powered search engine could be making a comeback.
Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, said in an interview with The Verge that the company may bring back Sydney, codenamed for Bing’s AI chatbot.
Sydney will first be tested by users in India and China in early 2021, reports The Verge. The public first learned of Sidney two years later when Stanford University student Kevin Liu prompted his Bing to recite the internal rules document, revealing the identity of the back end. It was after letting Sydney’s popularity grew when users like Kevin Ruth of The New York Times forced Bing to reveal its persona after having a long conversation with the bot.
The tech giant added guardrails days after users accused it of generating unlimited responses to queries.Sidney reportedly told The Times’ Roose to break up with his wife, picked fights with users who disagreed with the chatbot’s responses, and even confessed his love to an insider during an experiment.
But some users were “extremely frustrated” by the way Microsoft limited the chatbot’s functionality, Scott said.
“They said, ‘It was fun. I loved it,'” he told The Verge.
Maybe that’s why Scott wants to bring Sydney back. He said the new Bing could have a personalized feature that he called a “metaprompt” that allows users to choose to interact with Sydney “in the not too distant future.”
“If you want Sydney, you can say Sydney,” Scott told The Verge.
It’s not just users. Microsoft employees miss Sydney so much that they even created a product inspired by its alias.
“We have Sydney swag in-house, but it’s very joking,” Scott told The Verge.
Scott’s comments come more than three months after Microsoft unveiled a beta version of its new AI-powered Bing search engine with the promise of being “more powerful than OpenAI’s ChatGPT.” Bing’s corporate vice president, Jordi Ribbas, said focusing on improving the bot’s capabilities will be a priority for the company after Bing’s Sydney fueled the anxiety of internet observers.
Meanwhile, the company earlier this week announced plans to integrate its Bing search engine into ChatGPT, giving users access to information in real time.
Microsoft declined an Insider’s request for comment.
