Google appears to be feeling the pressure from OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The chatbot driven by artificial intelligence has swept the IT industry over the past several months because it can give people the information they need in an approachable way. According to The New York Times, Google has altered its plans in response to ChatGPT’s threat to its search business over the past few weeks.
According to the article, CEO Sundar Pichai has accelerated AI development and issued a “code red” declaration. At least 20 AI-powered products and a chatbot for its search engine are apparently in the works at Google, with at least some expected to make their debut at its I/O conference in May.
An image generation tool, an updated version of AI Test Kitchen (an app used to test prototypes), a YouTube green screen mode modeled after TikTok, and a tool that can create videos that summarize other clips are among the AI projects Google is working on, according to a slide deck seen by the Times. A feature called Shopping Try-on (perhaps similar to one Amazon has been working on), a wallpaper maker for Pixel phones, and AI-driven tools that might make it simpler for developers to create Android apps are also in the works.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who founded Google, reportedly attended a meeting with Pichai last month to discuss AI goals and solicit comments. Since 2019, the pair’s day-to-day participation with the business has been minimal because they are concentrating on other ventures.
According to reports, Google has made an effort to expedite the product clearance process, including tests to make sure AI-driven technology is just and moral. The corporation is also reportedly changing the amount of risk it is willing to accept as it introduces such technology. The search chatbot experiment appears to prioritize accuracy, screening out false information, and safety. The Times reported that Google has “a lower bar and will strive to mitigate issues connected to hate and toxicity, danger and disinformation rather than preventing them” for the other goods and capabilities it is developing.
Google has recently been more cautious when announcing new products. The key concerns of AI technology were purportedly listed in the slide deck as “copyright, privacy, and antitrust.” According to reports, it acknowledged the need for solutions to keep copyrighted content out and stop the sharing of personally identifiable information.
There has been blowback over Google’s handling of AI ethics over the past few years. Two eminent experts on AI ethics, Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, said Google fired them. Gebru and Mitchell claimed that Google has suppressed studies that question the efficacy of AI language learning models, including claims that these models may embed biases discovered in training data. The researchers stated in a paper that this could lead to “models that encode stereotyped and negative linkages along gender, race, ethnicity, and disability status.” False information might also be present in training datasets. After Gebru and Mitchell departed Google early last year, two other respected ethics scholars also left the company.
It’s not hard to see why Google is allegedly in a panic over ChatGPT. For starters, reports from earlier this month indicated that Microsoft, an investor in OpenAI, intended to integrate some of the technology underlying ChatGPT into Bing. The business announced this week that ChatGPT will soon be incorporated into the Azure OpenAI Service.
The most recent information regarding Google’s response to ChatGPT came shortly after the business made an announcement about 12,000 job cuts. In a note to colleagues, Pichai stated, “I am confident about the enormous opportunity in front of us thanks to the strength of our purpose, the value of our products and services, and our early investments in AI. “We’ll need to make hard decisions if we want to truly capture it.”
The CEO also stated that the organization is getting ready to release “some completely novel experiences for customers, programmers, and companies. With AI, we have a significant potential before us across all of our products, and we’re ready to pursue it bravely and ethically.”
