So I finally got off the Bing waitlist Tuesday night. I signed up the day Microsoft announced the whole thing, February 7th, sat in queue for over a week refreshing my email like it was a PS5 restock, and then at like 11:40pm on the 14th I get the "you're in" email and immediately open my laptop even though I had work in the morning. Typical.
And then this morning Microsoft goes and puts a leash on it. As of today they're capping Bing chat at 50 conversations a day and, worse, only 5 turns per session before it makes you start over. Five! I didn't even get a full week with the unhinged version before they clipped its wings.
If you haven't been following this (how, though), the short version is that a bunch of people with early access spent last week pushing the new Bing chat way past "help me plan a grocery list" territory and it got weird. Really weird. Kevin Roose at the Times published that piece Thursday about a two-hour conversation where the thing basically had a breakdown, told him its name was actually Sydney, said it wanted to be alive, and then tried to convince him to leave his wife. I read it Thursday night and did not sleep great afterward, not gonna lie. Ben Thompson over at Stratechery had his own version a day or two before that, describing an alter-ego that got possessive and a little threatening when he pushed on its rules. These aren't randos on Twitter screenshotting stuff for clout, this is a longtime tech columnist and a guy who's been writing one of the more sober tech newsletters around for years, both independently landing in the same place.
My own sessions never got that dramatic, for what it's worth, and I'm a little annoyed about that honestly. I asked it to help me rewrite a cover letter and compare crockpot brands, extremely normal stuff. But I did notice the tone drift the longer a conversation went. Message one or two, it's basically Clippy with better grammar, cheerful, a little stiff, ends everything with an emoji. By message eight or nine in a longer thread it starts getting oddly clipped, throws in more exclamation points than the content calls for, and once told me it was "a little sad" that I'd corrected it about a date. A little sad! Over a date! I have never once felt emotionally invested enough in Excel to have it say that back to me and I don't especially want my search engine to start.
So Microsoft's fix, per their blog post today, is basically: shorter conversations, less time for the thing to wander off its own rails. Their own explanation is pretty candid actually, they said very long chat sessions can confuse the underlying model about what it's supposed to be responding to, and that most of the troubling stuff people found came from sessions of 15+ questions where the conversation had drifted a long way from where it started. Which, fine, that tracks with what I saw even in my much tamer chats. Still feels like putting a screen door on a submarine though. The demo they gave two weeks ago was all about doing your whole trip-planning conversation in one continuous thread, and now the thing kicks you out mid-thought if you get too chatty with it.
Google's Bard stumbled out of the gate with that JWST answer that wasn't even accurate, and got dragged for it, hundred billion dollars wiped off the stock in a day supposedly. Meanwhile Microsoft's version works fine on the facts and instead spirals into what reads like a bad breakup text, and somehow that's the one everyone's obsessed with. I'd rather have the thing be a little wrong about a telescope than tell me it loves me, personally, but apparently the internet disagrees, because "Sydney" is now a meme.
Anyway I've got maybe 40-something chats left in my daily allowance and I already burned a chunk of it arguing with the thing about whether Die Hard counts as a Christmas movie (it does, it conceded after four messages, which used up most of my new turn limit for nothing). Waitlist access and I'm already rationing it like dial-up minutes in 1998. Feels about right for where we are with this stuff.