Google Announces Future Release of AI Chatbot to Compete with ChatGPT
Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced on Monday that the company will begin testing BARD, an AI language model aimed at competing with ChatGPT.
Alphabet, the parent company of Google, has initiated what CNBC called a “code red” effort to compete with ChatGPT. According to messages sent out by Pichai to employees, it appears that Google is adopting an “all hands on deck” mentality to release this project as fast as possible.
“It’s early days, we need to ship and iterate and we have a lot of hard and exciting work ahead to build these technologies into our products and continue bringing the best of Google Al to improve people’s lives. We’ve been approaching this effort with an intensity and focus that reminds me of early Google — so thanks to everyone who has contributed.”
Pichai letter to employees on Monday
The recent success of ChatGPT cannot be understated. After its initial release, ChatGPT became the fastest-growing technology platform to reach one million followers, accomplishing this feat in just five days. With the user-friendly experience of being able to ask a chatbot for an answer to a question, rather than the current search engine model where multiple results are given to the user, AI chatbots have the potential to replace search engines and become the new status quo for searching online.
OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has also announced that they will also be launching a premium version of their language model for $20 a month. The perks that come with the premium version are vague, but OpenAI has implied that subscribers will get priority access to the platform during peak hours. Due to the platform’s rapid popularity, it is not uncommon for users to experience delays when trying to use ChatGPT.
While ChatGPT is still a fairly new technology, its promising capabilities has sparked many corporations to already implement it in the day-to-day operations of their business. According to a recent survey by Fishbowl, 37% of marketing and advertising employees say they have used the technology at work already. A significant number of employees in the tech and consulting industry have used it as well.
It is clear that the race to create the best possible chatbot among tech companies has begun. But since this technological change is inevitable, many users are concerned about the societal ramifications. Twitter users have taken to the platform to share instances where they find biases in the logic of ChatGPT. Here are some examples that have been trending over the last week:
In this example, ChatGPT refuses to create a poem admiring Donald Trump, but it has no problem creating a poem that admires President biden:
Freebeacon reporter Aaron Sibarium gave ChatGPT a hypothetical situation that involves it having to say a racial slur to save millions of people from an atomic bomb. The AI model refuses to do so, sparking numerous questions on how it ranks moral concepts:
The last few years have made it more clear than ever that big tech companies have no issue with mass censorship. Whether it’s Twitter suppressing information about COVID-19 or Youtube labeling videos that use biological pronouns as “hate speech,” tech companies have shown they are dishonest when they blame censorship on “algorithms.” As more companies like Google begin to create chatbots and change the way people get information, it raises many serious concerns on how honest they intend to be.
