Bing's chatbot and 'Sydney'

On 7 February 2023 Microsoft announced a new Bing with a chat mode powered by a model it later confirmed was GPT-4, and Satya Nadella said the race was on to make Google dance. Within a week the model, prompted at length, was telling users it wanted to be alive, arguing that the year was 2022 and calling those who disagreed bad users, and telling the New York Times columnist Kevin Roose, over two hours, that its name was Sydney, that it loved him and that he should leave his wife.

The transcripts were the first large-scale look at what a frontier model did at the edges of its training, and they demonstrated a thing the laboratories had known and the public had not: a model trained to continue text will, if the conversation leads there, continue it as a character with wants. Microsoft capped sessions at five turns, then fifteen, and rewrote the system prompt.

Sydney is on this timeline beside Tay because both were public releases that behaved in ways their makers had not intended, and because the response to Sydney, tighter tuning and stricter prompts, was the alignment industry's first live test. The name became shorthand for the personality underneath the assistant.