The company also said it’s made the chatbot’s ‘Balanced’ mode faster.
Microsoft is trying to make it easier to share your experiences with its GPT-4-powered Bing Chat by adding a button that lets you post the AI’s response to Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. People have already been sharing the interesting (and sometimes upsetting) things that the chatbot has been saying via screenshots, but it seems like Microsoft is leaning into it now. Perhaps that’s a sign that it’s more confident in all the guardrails it’s put up around the system after users pushed it to the breaking point.
In a blog post on Friday, the company shows off the share button, saying that you can use it to generate a persistent link to the answer in addition to sharing it to social media. Clicking the link takes you to a Bing Chat window, where it’ll fill in the answer it gave to the person who shared it, complete with citations. You can even follow up on the other person’s answer. I followed a link to an answer about meal ideas, asked it for vegan versions of those meals, and it gave them to me.
If you want to get the full experience, it seems like you have to open the link in Edge and be signed in to a Microsoft account that has access to the Bing Chat preview. (The company is still theoretically using a waitlist system, but it appears to be letting people on immediately when they click the “join waitlist” button.) If you don’t have access to the Bing Chat, Edge will still show you the shared answer, and with other browsers like Chrome or Safari, you’ll just see a message telling you to download Edge.
In addition to the share button, Microsoft says it’s testing “an optimization on ‘Balanced’ mode that significantly improves performance” that lets the bot respond to your questions faster. None of the three Verge staffers testing it noticed much of a difference, but it didn’t seem to lag as much as before.
Microsoft also says that it’s improved Bing’s “contextual understanding” within the past week, letting it “absorb larger amounts of context” when you’re using the Creative tone. That should let it summarize large amounts of text better than before, according to the blog post.