It turned out that the chatbot that Microsoft has integrated into the Bing search engine has been developed for several years under the codename Sydney. It is even stated that the neural network was publicly tested in a small number of countries in late 2020, but hardly noticed by anyone.Caitlin Roulston, Microsoft’s director of communications, told The Verge, “Sydney is the old codename for a chatbot based on early language models that we started testing in India in late 2020. The data we got as part of this was a preview of the new Bing. He helped us with our work on the version.”
Chatbot idea goes back to 2017
Microsoft has been trying to add a chatbot to Bing since almost 2017. The company tried to use machine learning technologies in Bing and Office in its first attempts, but failed to achieve the desired result. Between 2017 and 2021, many improvements were made and the strategy shifted to the idea of creating a single chatbot called Sydney that would respond to different queries in Bing.
Early versions of Sydney lacked personality, according to sources close to the company. But all that changed in the summer of 2022. OpenAI presented Microsoft with the game-changing next-generation GPT language model. We are probably talking about an early version of the GPT-4 model, which has not yet been announced.
The new major language model was the breakthrough Microsoft needed to bring all the knowledge it acquired in Sydney to the masses, after more than 6 years of dreaming of building a dialog-based search engine.
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