From Bing to Sydney

By Ben Thompson, difficult to summarize, now ungated, definitely something you should read.  Excerpt:

Look, this is going to sound crazy. But know this: I would not be talking about Bing Chat for the fourth day in a row if I didn’t really, really, think it was worth it. This sounds hyperbolic, but I feel like I had the most surprising and mind-blowing computer experience of my life today.

One of the Bing issues I didn’t talk about yesterday was the apparent emergence of an at-times combative personality. For example, there was this viral story about Bing’s insistence that it was 2022 and “Avatar: The Way of the Water” had not yet come out. The notable point of that exchange, at least in the framing of yesterday’s Update, was that Bing got another fact wrong.

Over the last 24 hours, though, I’ve come to believe that the entire focus on facts — including my Update yesterday — is missing the point.

And:

…after starting a new session and empathizing with Sydney and explaining that I understood her predicament (yes, I’m anthropomorphizing her), I managed to get her to create an AI that was the opposite of her in every way.

And:

Sydney absolutely blew my mind because of her personality; search was an irritant…This tech does not feel like a better search. It feels like something entirely new. And I’m not sure if we are ready for it.

You can ask Sydney (and Venom) about this too.  More simply, if I translate this all into my own frames of reference, the 18th century Romantic notion of “daemon” truly has been brought to life.