During a recent meeting of all hands, Google employees wondered aloud if the latest OpenAI chatbot ChatGPT beats the company in the fight for supremacy in the field of artificial intelligence (AI).
As reported by CNBC (opens in a new tab) (which did not disclose the source), one employee question referred to Google’s refusal to implement AI in its search function as a “missed opportunity”, especially considering the company had already built LaMDA, an AI chatbot that was marked as sentient (opens in a new tab) by Google engineer Blake Lemoine in June 2022 before being fired in July.
ChatGPT is live chat a bot aimed at providing both factual information knowledge and creative answers to user queries and suggestions, which, according to Google employees, is already the wheelhouse of what Google is already doing.
Chatbot Wars
However, the CEO of Google parent company Alphabet Sundar Pichai and Google’s head of AI Jeff Dean responded by saying that it’s not that Google doesn’t have the ability to implement AI in searches, but that Google needs to protect its the reputation of the exact source of information that Artificial intelligence cannot always be relied upon (opens in a new tab).
“It really hits the needs that people seem to have, but it’s also important to realize that these models have certain types of issues,” said Dean. “If [an AI is] I’m not sure about anything, they’ll just tell you, you know [that] elephants are the animals that lay the biggest eggs or something.
Google may be right, but independent analysts have theirs. CNBC quoted Morgan Stanley’s chief Alphabet analyst Brian Nowak as saying that the lingering fear will be that language models will subtract Google’s market share “and disrupt [its] position as an entry point for people on the Internet.
And while it will still be a while before Google can see this disruption – and it’s a big “maybe” – Nowak noted that LaMDA is still in active development, with Google continuing to tests (opens in a new tab) and launch new products based on artificial intelligence.
For example, in December 2022, the Google Tensorflow team released a machine learning extension for Google Sheets which was aimed at total novices in AI.
Simply put, Google has no intention of waiting to be overtaken by OpenAI or other AI providers in a renewed battle for internet supremacy.