There’s an awful lot of judgement, engineering and technique that goes into a really well thought out product. It’s often deeply underestimated, and culture makes a huge difference in execution. Bing/Sydney came out after ChatGPT, based on exactly the same tech, but was hot garbage.
I don’t know, my family talks almost daily about how amazing bing chat is. The Sydney eta was kind of crazy, but the core product seems to be doing well.
It is definitely solving a different problem than chatgpt though, and maybe a less inspiring problem. Chatgpt is like an open world game where you can do anything; Bing chat is just a point solution for the vicious spiral of SEO and Google’s profit motive that rendered search results and web pages so useless.
It’s interesting to see the ad implementation, I recall some predictions that Microsoft would be particularly apt at finding a way to integrate advertising organically. Instead it just seems to have made the bot more stupid because sponsored products are forced into its recommendations.
I’ve gone back to just using the GPT API, unless I absolutely need to search the internet or information after 2021 for some reason.
There are three modes to Bing Chat, and at least two models involved. AFAIK only the "creative" mode uses GPT-4 (the other two some flavors of GPT-3.5).
As far as I can see Bing/Creative is no different to ChatGPT+ (the non-free version) which is also GPT-4 based.
It’s a dramatically worse chat bot, but being able to search the internet does give it an additional useful capability, while limiting it to five interactions papers over its psychotic tendencies.
