In the wake of ChatGPT, Google is worried it’s behind the times
Employees think chatbots may be the future of the internet
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In a recent all-hands meeting,Googleemployees wondered aloud whetherOpenAI’s latestchatbotChatGPTis beating the company to the punch for dominance in the artificial intelligence (AI) field.
As reported byCNBC(which did not disclose a source), one employee question referred to Google’s refusal as yet to implement AI into its search function as a “missed opportunity”, especially given that it has already built LaMDA, an AI chatbot that waslabelled sentientby Google engineer Blake Lemoine in June 2022 before he was fired in July.
ChatGPTis alive chatbot designed to provide both factual information knowledge and creative responses to user queries and prompts, which, as Google employees are pointing out, is already the wheelhouse of what Google already does.
Chatbot wars
However, the CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, and the head of Google’s AI division Jeff Dean responded by saying that it wasn’t a matter of Google lacking the capabilities to implement AI into searches, but of Google needing to protect its reputation as an accurate source of information, whichAI cannot always be relied upon to be.
“This really strikes a need that people seem to have but it’s also important to realize these models have certain types of issues,” Dean said. “If [an AI is] not really sure about something, they’ll just tell you, you know, [that] elephants are the animals that lay the largest eggs or whatever.”
Google may have a point, but independent analysts have theirs.CNBCquoted Morgan Stanley’s lead Alphabet analyst Brian Nowak as saying that the persistent fear would be that language models would take market share from Google, “and disrupt [its] position as the entry point for people on the Internet.”
And while it’s still going to be some time before Google might see that disruption - and it’s a big ‘might’ - Nowak did note that LaMDA is still in active development, and that Google is continuing toresearchand release new AI-driven products.
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In December 2022, for instance, Google’s Tensorflow teamreleased a machine learning extension for Google Sheetsthat was aimed at total newcomers to AI.
Simply put, Google has no intention of waiting to be overtaken by OpenAI or other AI providers in the renewed fight for internet dominance.
Luke Hughes holds the role of Staff Writer at TechRadar Pro, producing news, features and deals content across topics ranging from computing to cloud services, cybersecurity, data privacy and business software.
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