ChatGPT and other chatbots are “code red” for Google Search

According to industry experts, as technology advances, Google needs to decide whether to overhaul its search engine and make a full-fledged chat bot the face of its flagship service.

Google has been reluctant to share its technology widely because, like ChatGPT and similar systems, it can generate false, toxic, and biased information. LaMDA is only available to a limited number of people through an experimental app, AI Test Kitchen.

Google sees this as a struggle to deploy its advanced AI without harming users or society, according to a memo seen by The Times. In a recent meeting, an executive acknowledged that small businesses had fewer concerns about releasing these tools, but said Google needed to get in on the fray or the industry could go on without it, according to one. audio recording of the meeting obtained by The Times.

Other companies have a similar problem. Five years ago, Microsoft launched a chat bot, called Tay, which spewed racist, xenophobic and otherwise filthy language and was forced to immediately remove it from the internet – never to return. In recent weeks, Meta removed a new chat bot for many of the same reasons.

The executives said in the recorded meeting that Google intended to release the technology that drives its chat bot as a cloud service for outside companies, and that it could integrate the technology into simple support tasks. customer. It will maintain its trust and safety standards for official products, but it will also release prototypes that do not meet those standards.

It can limit these prototypes to 500,000 users and warn them that the technology could produce false or offensive claims. Since its release on the last day of November, ChatGPT – which can produce similarly toxic material – has been used by over a million people.

“A cool demo of a conversational system that people can interact with in a few turns, and it’s mind-blowing? It’s a good step, but it’s not what will really transform society,” Zoubin Ghahramani said. , who oversees the Google Brain artificial intelligence lab, in an interview with The Times last month ahead of the release of ChatGPT, “It’s not something people can reliably use on a day-to-day basis.”