Microsoft expects 3 language model updates for Bing Chat per year

Last week, Microsoft shipped Bing Chat to open preview for everyone to try out. However, you’ll still need a Microsoft Account to access the AI chatbot’s capabilities.

Of course, the company continues to push updates as well as improvements to Bing Chat ever so often in a bid to enhance its user experience, with the latest update adding chat saving support. But a concerned user reached out to Microsoft’s CEO of Advertising and Web Services, Mikhail Parakhin on Twitter seeking to understand how and when the company updates the chatbot’s models.

@MParakhin would it be possible to share more about when/how the underlying models are updated as opposed to the prompt (and maybe even what was changed and the expected outcome)? It would be great to know when to reevaluate base model capabilities like reasoning/creativity/etc.

— Ryan Tremblay (@zaptrem) May 8, 2023

Mikhail disclosed that the company takes several months to train Bing Chat’s models. As such, users are highly likely to see the models updated at least three times a year. “Models themselves it takes months to train, so, outside of some small RLHF tuning runs, you should expect models to be updated maybe 3 times a year or so,” says Mikhail.

After shipping Bing Chat to open preview, Microsoft also promised that it is working closely with OpenAI to bring third-party plugin support to the chatbot. In turn, this will allow developers to create plug-ins for Bing Chat.

via SE Roundtable