Microsoft plans to double the query input character limit for the personal and enterprise versions of the Bing Chat chatbot from the current 4,000 characters to 8,000 characters, but says it may not be able to do so quickly due to cost issues.
When Bing Chat was launched at the beginning of this year, as long as it responded to questions more than 15 times, it would exhibit abnormal behavior, such as conflicts with users or excessive tone, forcing Microsoft to quickly reduce the number of questions and answers and the number of characters entered by users. As its performance stabilizes, Microsoft gradually relaxes Bing Chat and user conversation input content. Currently Windows users can ask Bing Chat 20 questions and 4,000 characters at a time. The enterprise version of Bing Chat launched in July also has the same restrictions.
This week’s response from Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s search departmentA request from a Bing Chat Enterprise user stated that Microsoft plans to increase the input character limit of the Windows consumer version and the enterprise version of Bing Chat from 4,000 characters to 8,000 characters (the input limit of the Chrome version of Bing Chat is 2,000 characters), but it will have to wait a while longer. The reason is that the algorithm will cause the context space requirement to increase exponentially, so a 2x character expansion will increase Bing Chat’s operating costs by 4x.
While Microsoft will definitely deliver on its promises, the reality is that running chatbots is resource-intensive.Servers running AI chatbots are not only very energy-consuming, but also involve higher cooling costs; according to“Fortune Magazine”A University of California study was quoted as saying that every time a user queries the server heat emitted by chatbots such as Microsoft Bing Chat or ChatGPT, one bottle of water is consumed. Microsoft’s data shows that due to the surge in the use of AI systems, the company’s global data center water usage will surge by 34% in 2022 compared with the previous year.
These huge expenses are a big challenge for new startups. Research institutions estimate that the daily operating cost of OpenAI’s ChatGPT is as high as US$700,000. If it were not for Microsoft’s financial injection, it might go bankrupt next year.
