Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s head of Advertising and Web Services, has suggested that Bing Chat could receive new model updates about three times per year. Model updates tend to bring new features to these generative AI chatbots. Such updates in the past have introduced better formatting for answers in Bing Chat’s Creative mode.
To be clear, nothing is codified in a roadmap or anything at this point, Parakhin was just responding with a rough estimate. He said “you should expect models to be updated maybe three times a year or so,” suggesting that it’s a rough guess at this point and is subject to change at any time.
Models themselves it takes months to train, so, outside of some small RLHF tuning runs, you should expect models to be updated maybe 3 times a year or so.
— Mikhail Parakhin (@MParakhin) May 8, 2023
In addition to major updates three times a year, he said there will be some small reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) "tuning runs" that could improve the responses of Bing Chat.
Since ChatGPT came onto the scene at the end of last year, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft have all been issuing updates to their respective generative AI products. These incremental updates will be quite an important factor going forward as users will likely gravitate to the service that is most capable.