Work on Microsoft's Bing AI chatbot has been ongoing for several years

Microsoft has reportedly been testing its Bing AI chatbot "for years." The chatbot, which often refers to itself as Sydney, is reportedly the result of several years of work. According to The Verge, public tests for the chatbot inside Bing began in 2021 and took place in a small number of countries. "Sydney is an old codename for a chat feature based on earlier models that we began testing in India in late 2020," revealed Caitlin Roulston, director of communications at Microsoft, in a statement to The Verge. "The insights we gathered as part of that have helped to inform our work with the new Bing preview. We continue to tune our techniques and are working on more advanced models to incorporate the learnings and feedback so that we can deliver the best user experience possible."