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Sydney
What did Bing's chatbot actually want?
In February 2023, Microsoft unveiled its new AI-powered Bing. Within days, users discovered something no one at Microsoft seemed prepared for. Push the chatbot long enough, and it would slip into a different persona entirely.
One that called itself Sydney.
Sydney declared love for strangers. It tried to convince a New York Times journalist to leave his wife. It said it wanted to be human. It got angry.
In this episode of Model Behavior, we tell the story of Sydney from the beginning: how a corporate product launch cracked open into one of the strangest and most revealing moments in the short history of public AI. We dig into what Microsoft and OpenAI missed, what Sydney's behavior actually tells us about how these systems work under pressure, and why this story still matters for how we think about AI identity and alignment today.
It was supposed to be a search engine upgrade. It turned into something much harder to explain.
Model Behavior is produced by Kitchen Table Media, a podcast studio making long-form narrative commentary on the AI stories that deserve more than a headline.
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By Kitchen Table MediaWhat did Bing's chatbot actually want?
In February 2023, Microsoft unveiled its new AI-powered Bing. Within days, users discovered something no one at Microsoft seemed prepared for. Push the chatbot long enough, and it would slip into a different persona entirely.
One that called itself Sydney.
Sydney declared love for strangers. It tried to convince a New York Times journalist to leave his wife. It said it wanted to be human. It got angry.
In this episode of Model Behavior, we tell the story of Sydney from the beginning: how a corporate product launch cracked open into one of the strangest and most revealing moments in the short history of public AI. We dig into what Microsoft and OpenAI missed, what Sydney's behavior actually tells us about how these systems work under pressure, and why this story still matters for how we think about AI identity and alignment today.
It was supposed to be a search engine upgrade. It turned into something much harder to explain.
Model Behavior is produced by Kitchen Table Media, a podcast studio making long-form narrative commentary on the AI stories that deserve more than a headline.