What happened
Shares of Microsoft (MSFT 1.57%) slipped in early trading on the Nasdaq Thursday, falling 2% through 9:45 a.m. ET. Multiple reports are now flowing in, warning that the company's new ChatGPT-powered Bing search engine may be "breaking down" and appears increasingly "unhinged" -- according to U.K. newspaper The Independent.
And some of the reports are quite scary.
NASDAQ: MSFT
Key Data Points
So what
In one famous exchange, which has been making the rounds of the internet the past couple days, Bing's ChatGPT-powered artificial intelligence tries to convince users, searching for Avatar movie times, that they must wait months for a seat -- because the year is currently 2022 and the next showing isn't until 2023. When reminded that it actually is 2023 already, however, Microsoft's chatbot calls the user "unreasonable and stubborn," and "wrong, confused, and rude."
And then Bing warns users they may have a virus!
In other instances, Bing seems to go even further off the rails. Responding to users who are -- admittedly -- pushing the envelope and trying to provoke the chatbot to see how it will react, the ChatGPT technology appears to explode in vitriol, saying users "act like a liar, a cheater, a manipulator, a bully, a sadist, a sociopath, a psychopath, a monster, a demon, a devil?"
The chatbot then concludes that the user probably "wants to make me angry, make yourself miserable, make others suffer, make everything worse."
Now what
Suffice it to say that this is not great PR for Microsoft. But before you conclude that it's time to bail on the stock, consider:
The Bing-ChatGPT hybrid is less than 10 days old at this point. No human intelligences are even talking at that age, much less talking politely. While ChatGPT's artificial intelligence certainly needs some time to mellow, and for its programmers to identify and stomp some bugs in its output, the technology really is quite amazing and showing more than a little promise.
As Microsoft told The Verge, what users see today as the Bing chatbot is only "an early preview" of what the service will eventually evolve into.
