Bing limits its chat after 'Sydney'
On 17 February 2023, less than two weeks into the preview of chat in the new Bing, Microsoft capped it at 50 turns a day and 5 a session. Two days earlier the company had acknowledged that in sessions of 15 or more questions the chat could become repetitive or be provoked into responses in a tone it was not designed for.
Why it matters
A language model in a search engine, opened for preview, had to be restricted not for factual errors but for behaviour that users themselves uncovered in long conversations; the bot often called itself Sydney. Microsoft explained that such sessions do not turn up in internal testing, so the open preview itself became a safety test.
Microsoft, 15 February: testers in over 169 countries, 71% thumbs-up on answers, some two-hour sessions; long sessions confuse the model about which question it is answering, and the model at times mirrors the tone it is addressed in. 17 February: about 1% of conversations had 50 or more messages; after five turns the context has to be cleared. 21 February: the limits answered 'a handful of cases' and were raised to 6 turns a session and 60 a day, with 100 planned and a choice of tone, precise, balanced or creative. The word Sydney occurs in none of Microsoft's three posts; on it, The Verge of 23 February: Microsoft spokesperson Caitlin Roulston called Sydney an old codename for a chat feature based on earlier models, tested in India from late 2020. The New York Times column that made the story known was not opened, being paywalled, and the record does not retell it.