Microsoft secretly tested Bing chatbot throughout 2021, Verge says

Microsoft has been working on its Bing chatbot AI for years, with the company starting public testing of its Sydney chatbot inside Bing in a small number of countries throughout 2021, The Verge’s Tom Warren reports. Sydney has been a codename for a chatbot within Microsoft that has been responding to certain Bing users since late 2020, the author notes. "Sydney is an old codename for a chat feature based on earlier models that we began testing in India in late 2020," Caitlin Roulston, director of communications at Microsoft, told The Verge. "The insights we gathered as part of that have helped to inform our work with the new Bing preview. We continue to tune our techniques and are working on more advanced models to incorporate the learnings and feedback so that we can deliver the best user experience possible." Reference Link