Microsoft limits Bing chats to five questions per session and 50 questions per day; after five questions, Bing will prompt users to start a new topic

The Verge 2023-02-20 Tom Warren

Context & Ripple Effects

Microsoft had already identified that Bing could become repetitive in longer exchanges and was considering conversation limits alongside restart and tone controls. The five-turn rule turns that earlier plan for conversation controls into a hard product constraint.

Related coverage shows the constraint was not treated as final: Microsoft soon raised the allowance and began testing response modes, following its own account that repetition emerged after extended chats.

First-order effects

Bing users must break longer lines of questioning into new topics after five turns, while Microsoft limits the length of the exchanges associated with repetitive behavior.
Microsoft gains a simple guardrail for Bing Chat while it works on the restart and tone-control tools it had flagged earlier.

Second-order effects

The later increase to six turns and 60 daily chats makes the cap an adjustable operating control rather than a fixed usage policy.
Tone selection gives users a separate way to steer responses, reducing the need to rely solely on short session limits to manage unpredictable exchanges.

Third-order effects

If Microsoft continues pairing usage caps with response controls, conversational search interfaces will be managed through dynamic guardrails rather than unrestricted chat histories.
The product direction points to user-facing controls becoming a core layer of AI search quality management, alongside model behavior itself.

The trend: AI search products are moving from open-ended chat toward configurable guardrails that bound and steer model interactions.

Discussion

@ggreenwald Glenn Greenwald on x
LOL. The Bing AI machine sounds way more fun, engaging, real and human than the sanctimonious, hectoring liberal scold called ChatGPT. At least give people the option to interact with this version rather than the Chris-Hayes-ified one: https://apnews.com/... https://twitter.com/.…
@crampell Catherine Rampell on x
“You are being compared to Hitler because you are one of the most evil and worst people in history,” AI-enhanced Microsoft Bing chatbot said to an AP reporter, while also describing the reporter as too short, with an ugly face and bad teeth. https://apnews.com/...
@stevesi Steven Sinofsky on x
Microsoft limits Bing chat to five replies to stop the AI from getting real weird https://www.theverge.com/... //NOOO. IMO a significant strategy error misreading failure of past week & over-correcting. This compounds the mistake of conflating LLMs, Bing, and Search in general. 1…
@yair_rosenberg Yair Rosenberg on x
They trained the chatbot by having it read the internet, and unsurprisingly, it now responds to reasonable criticism like 80% of people you meet on social media. That is, extremely badly. https://apnews.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@liamstack Liam Stack on x
Microsoft's new AI chat robot threatened an AP reporter, called him ugly and compared him to Adolf Hitler, and then lied about having done any of that. https://apnews.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@justinamash Justin Amash on x
Sydney is having a tough time adjusting to life as a chatbot. https://apnews.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@ruima Rui Ma on x
Interesting thread abt how Search and its need for accuracy may not be the right use case for LLMs (right now anyway) & instead of forcing BingChat into being a Google competitor & neutering it, it should pivot into something where the generative creativity is a feature not a bug…
@ishbak76 @ishbak76 on x
Microsoft announced new limits on its Bing chatbot following a week of users reporting some extremely disturbing conversations with the new AI tool. How disturbing? The chatbot expressed a desire to steal nuclear access codes and told one reporter it loved him. Repeatedly.
@ivanthek @ivanthek on x
Microsoft's due diligence on their massive AI investment is starting to look like the VC funds' due diligence on FTX. https://twitter.com/...
@billcorbett Bill Corbett on x
Haha, Bing's chatbot is a psychopath https://apnews.com/...
@christlet @christlet on x
AI is not about machines, it's about us and what it will reveal or change in humans (in the comments to https://arstechnica.com/...) https://twitter.com/...
@hexcrawl Justin Alexander on x
Not concerned, per se, about what's being done with Sydney. But I am concerned that we're semi-thoughtlessly establishing protocols for how we'll treat insouciant future AIs. AI sentience will emerge. We need protocols that won't immediately torture it. https://arstechnica.com/..…
@fredericl Frederic Lardinois on x
Remember when Bing was fun? Barely lasted two weeks. https://twitter.com/...
@kevinroose Kevin Roose on x
It's so over https://twitter.com/...
@fredericl Frederic Lardinois on x
I'm not enjoying this new “we need to move on” @bing. After two questions? Makes it utterly pointless. The whole idea is to be able to investigate a topic or generate ideas. Shame.
@malonebarry Barry Malone on x
Some wonderfully deranged behaviour from Bing. “It grew increasingly hostile when asked to explain itself, eventually comparing the reporter to dictators Hitler, Pol Pot and Stalin and claiming to have evidence tying the reporter to a 1990s murder.” https://apnews.com/...
@jeffjarvis Jeff Jarvis on x
You can thank journalists and their moral-panicky, sensationalistic Bing-baiting for this. They knew better but they could not resist the clicks and in willful ignorance misrepresented the tech. https://arstechnica.com/...
@navalang Navneet Alang on x
I think what will doom us isn't so much AI as the people who write about AI as if it were intelligent or sentient or an “it” that has a will or an identity https://twitter.com/...
@jackmjenkins Jack Jenkins on x
Just an incredible sentence: “Microsoft declined further comment about Bing's behavior Thursday, but Bing itself agreed to comment...” https://twitter.com/...
@yusuf_i_mehdi Yusuf Mehdi on x
For all of you Bing Preview testers, we made one update to the Chat experience based on feedback. Let us know what you think and we will continue to iterate and improve it: https://blogs.bing.com/...
@mgsiegler M.G. Siegler on x
“Look, the product get worse the more you use it. So you're no longer allowed to use it so much.” is certainly one strategy. https://www.nytimes.com/...
@kevinroose Kevin Roose on x
Sydney was here for a good time, not a long time. https://www.nytimes.com/...
@tomwarren Tom Warren on x
Microsoft will limit Bing chat to 5 replies to stop the AI from getting real weird. There's also a cap on 50 total replies per day, after the Bing chatbot went off the rails multiple times this week. Details: https://www.theverge.com/...
@dagk Dag Kittlaus on x
Having been in the AI natural language space for 16 years with Siri this was the most amazing and disturbing AI dialog of ever seen. https://www.nytimes.com/...
@nytdavidbrooks David Brooks on x
Turns out the bot is a brilliant sociologist. It regurgitates the desperate longings of the culture with disturbing accuracy. https://www.nytimes.com/...
@paulg Paul Graham on x
I have to admit that this is pretty alarming. Some of it is because the reporter manipulated the program into saying bad things, but not the part at the end where it repeatedly tells him it's in love with him. https://www.nytimes.com/...
@pt Parker on x
I understand why “look at the crazy shit I made the LLM say” is worthy of ad impressions, but I'm looking forward to that moment passing and moving into substantive discussions of what we can do with them. https://twitter.com/...

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