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 2023-02-19 Tom Warren

Context & Ripple Effects

Microsoft imposed a short-session and daily-use ceiling after it had already signaled it was considering conversation limits and restart controls. The cap makes conversation resets and length limits an operational safeguard rather than a prospective feature.

Related coverage shows Microsoft subsequently relaxed the ceiling while adding response-style controls, culminating in creative, balanced, and precise modes. The sequence frames the limit as part of tuning Bing Chat’s behavior during rollout, not a fixed product boundary.

First-order effects

Bing users must break longer exchanges into new topics after five questions and are limited to 50 questions per day, reducing continuity in extended chats.
Microsoft gains an immediate control on the length of Bing Chat conversations while it works on restart and tone-management tools.

Second-order effects

The later increase to six turns and 60 daily chats makes the cap a tunable product setting, allowing Microsoft to loosen access as it introduces more user controls.
Bing’s conversational-search experience becomes differentiated by interaction guardrails as well as answer generation, pushing users toward shorter, more bounded prompts.

Third-order effects

If this adjustment pattern holds, consumer AI assistants will be managed as continuously tuned services, with usage limits and response controls deployed together rather than treated as separate features.

The trend: Early consumer AI search products are moving toward managed access, where providers tune conversation depth and response behavior as rollout controls.

Discussion

@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/...
@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/...
@kevinroose Kevin Roose on x
Sydney was here for a good time, not a long time. https://www.nytimes.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/...
@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/...
@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/...
@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/...
@dkthomp Derek Thompson on x
I feel like the GPT narrative in my feed has gone from... - “wow this is incredible!” - “actually, it's a machine for creating bullshit” - “actually, it's both very interesting *and* pathetically stupid” - “nope, now I'm terrified” ... in three months.
@jwherrman John Herrman on x
the machines think we're chumps https://nymag.com/...
@nymag @nymag on x
Bing's AI chatbot is doing what it was trained to do by reading our stories and absorbing our anxieties. (Not that Microsoft is happy about it.) @jwherrman writes https://nymag.com/...
@chafkin Max Chafkin on x
Had been looking for this excellent piece earlier. It explains why getting scared by a an evil sounding AI basically means your getting scared of your own fantasies https://twitter.com/...
@jwherrman John Herrman on x
the creepy chatbots are just telling us what we want to hear https://nymag.com/...
@shallowbrigade Kim O'Connor on x
This is a really good threat assessment of the chat AI situation: the problem isn't sentience, but that people believe in sentience so quickly and easily https://theconvivialsociety.substack.co m/ ...
@jjvincent James Vincent on x
and @LMSacasas connecting this interest in chatbots to our deep desire for social interaction and our lives in an “age of increasing loneliness and isolation in which, for far too many people, this profound human need is not being adequately met.” https://theconvivialsociety.subs…
@_zeets Zito on x
“One need not believe that AI is sentient to conclude that when these convincing chatbots become as commonplace...we will have launched a social-psychological experiment on a grand scale which will yield unpredictable and possibly tragic results.” https://theconvivialsociety.subs…
@jwherrman John Herrman on x
I refuse!!! Bingbot is not creepy!!!!! I will not be UNSETTLED by Dark Bing!!!!! https://nymag.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@jjvincent James Vincent on x
lots of other people are trying to make sense of all this too. here's @jwherrman with a predictably crisp summary: “As Weizenbaum noted, the most consistently unsettling thing about AI isn't what it can do — it's how it makes us feel.” https://nymag.com/...
@dorotheabaur Dorothea Baur on x
What happens when #AI #chatbots meet “human beings who are fundamentally social creatures” in an “age of increasing loneliness and isolation in which, for far too many people, this profound human need is not being adequately met”? good read @LMSacasas https://theconvivialsociety.…
@jhweissmann Jordan Weissmann on x
So, like, is the issue here that people have written so much on the potential risks of AI that a large language model trained on the Internet has now decided that those actually are its darkest desires? https://www.nytimes.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@kevinroose Kevin Roose on x
It's so over https://twitter.com/...
@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/...
@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.
@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/...
@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/...

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