Oh my, Daisy
After one of its executives revealed that the business hurried its rollout, Google may have officially entered the artificial intelligence arms race.
John Hennessy, the chairman of Google parent firm Alphabet, revealed a very intriguing fact about Bard, the tech giant’s recently unveiled rival to OpenAI’s massively popular and contentious ChatGPT, during a discussion at the TechSurge geek conference.
According to Hennessy, “I think Google was hesitant to productize this because it didn’t think it was truly ready for a product yet,” but “as a showcase vehicle, I think it’s a terrific piece of technology.”
The Bard of It
Google’s Bard chatbot was unveiled last week with a demo that contained a pretty glaring factual error, and that was just the beginning of the issues. After making pre-release headlines last summer when one of its (now-fired) engineers went public with his belief that the AI had gained sentience, the problems started even before that.
Within a few days of that disastrous rollout demo, CNBC reported that Google staff members were extremely dissatisfied with Bard’s performance, with one even going so far as to create and circulate an internal meme that claimed the business had devolved into a veritable “dumpster fire” since the year 2023.
That elephant was undoubtedly present during Hennessy’s keynote at the Mountain View, California, tech summit. In summary, many dissatisfied Google employees believed Bard’s catastrophic introduction was a rush job in response to ChatGPT’s overwhelming popularity.
David And Goliath
Hennessy said that one reason OpenAI defeated Google in the launch of their chatbot was that Bard was still throwing out false information, as reported by CNBC. Fair enough, ChatGPT also makes mistakes similar to these, but OpenAI is not Google, and it can afford to take chances that Google cannot.
The Alphabet chief warned against releasing a system that “says inappropriate things or occasionally says harmful things,” adding that technology should be “a little more sensitive about the environment we create in civil society.”
