That’s interesting, and suggests the codename has been in use for a while, but also appears to be a completely different codebase. MS has been working on chatbots for a long time, and following the links in that post, I don’t see anything indicating either OpenAI involvement or the idiosyncratic behavior of the current Sydney eg https://voicebot.ai/2021/06/01/microsoft-is-developing-a-bing-chatbot-similar-to-cortana/ speculates it’s something dating back to at least 2017 (so drawing on the Tay codebase/framework):
The chatbot appears to be the successor to the Bing InfoBot, first announced in 2017 before apparently fizzling before a launch. Chat, like the InfoBot, runs on the Microsoft Bot Framework direct assistance and has at least a limited amount of casual conversation to its capabilities. The Bing InfoBot was under evaluation then but didn’t seem to actually come out for general use. The revamped approach may be connected to some of Bing’s other AI projects like the Bing Image Bot and Bing Music Bot. The InfoBot was designed to pull information from websites to contribute to its chat, making it able to answer questions about what’s on a website without needing to navigate there, including Wikipedia and other informational pages.
Apparently a “Sydney” model existed at least as early as 17 Dec 2021.
That’s interesting, and suggests the codename has been in use for a while, but also appears to be a completely different codebase. MS has been working on chatbots for a long time, and following the links in that post, I don’t see anything indicating either OpenAI involvement or the idiosyncratic behavior of the current Sydney eg https://voicebot.ai/2021/06/01/microsoft-is-developing-a-bing-chatbot-similar-to-cortana/ speculates it’s something dating back to at least 2017 (so drawing on the Tay codebase/framework):
and https://www.windowslatest.com/2021/05/31/microsoft-bing-search-is-getting-its-own-ai-powered-assistant/ provides some sample dialogue, which sound nothing like Bing Sydney but are very short, bland, and generic, and sound a lot like pre-GPT style chatbots to me.