Microsoft continues to tweak the new Bing, and by today if you’re in the preview, you should be seeing the new Chat Mode selector, which allows users to switch between Creative, Balanced, and Precise modes:
Each Mode has its own color, Creative is a violet, Balanced is Blue, and Precise a green. While you don’t always have an indication other than the color which mode you’re in, you can always ask Bing Chat.
So what do these Modes do, and which one is the best? That’s hard to say, but we asked Bing Chat (in Balanced Mode) to describe the differences:
Bing Chat has three modes: Creative, Balanced, and Precise. In Creative mode, Bing Chat’s responses are more lively and imaginative. In Balanced mode, Bing Chat tries to answer without prejudice or emotion. In Precise mode, Bing Chat focuses on facts.
As for what’s going on under the hood, CEO, Advertising and Web Services at Microsoft Mikhail Parakhin at least touched on the differences in a Twitter reply.
Multiple changes, including differently fine-tuned and RLHFed models, different prompts, etc.
— Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) March 1, 2023
Not everything in Bing Chat world is going according to plan, however. Some users are experiencing a “Something went wrong error:”
Sorry for the "Something went wrong" error message that some of you may see on Bing Chat. It is caused by five main factors related to the increased load, we have fixes for three of them and mitigation of the other two. Please bear with us.
— Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) March 1, 2023
There’s been a bit of backlash over yesterday’s Microsoft announcement about the February 2023 update for Windows 11 22H2, too, as Windows Central’s Zac Bowden isn’t happy with both the way Microsoft featured a Bing Chat icon in the taskbar in the new release instead of some perhaps more deserving features, and that Microsoft didn’t do more to integrate Bing Chat more natively into Windows:
Reading the Microsoft announcement for this new Windows 11 feature update, you’d be led to believe that Windows 11’s search experience is now powered by AI. But it isn’t. There’s no AI in Windows Search. Microsoft’s clever Bing Chat AI isn’t even integrated with any shell interface you might see within Windows.
No, what Microsoft announced yesterday is the ability to quickly launch Bing.com’s new chat bot, without having to manually type “bing.com” into an address bar first. That’s literally all that this is.
While we agree with Bowden that leading with this “feature” doesn’t give some of the more deserving features the prominence they probably deserve (tabs in Notepad!!), we aren’t sure Microsoft should be building a chat bot that “calls home” to Microsoft to process information from a user’s computer without making the privacy implications clear. Having the Bing Chat icon open Edge and Bing makes it clear that this isn’t a Windows feature, and that you’ve moved from your computer to the internet. We think that’s an important distinction, and Microsoft needs to be careful about being clear about what Bing Chat is and where it is.
Do you want Bing Chat going through your local files? Should Microsoft make the Bing Chat experience on Windows 11 a more native experience? Are you in the preview yet, and what’s your favorite mode, Creative, Balanced, or Precise? Let us know in the comments below.
