Google warns of AI pitfalls in chatbots when developing Bard Against ChatGPT: report

Google’s search engine boss warned of artificial intelligence pitfalls in chatbots in a newspaper interview published on Saturday, as Google’s parent company Alphabet battles to compete with the app at ChatGPT success.

“This kind of artificial intelligence that we are talking about right now can sometimes lead to what we call hallucinations,” Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president of Google and head of Google search, told German newspaper Welt am Sonntag.

“It then expresses itself in such a way that a machine provides a convincing but completely made-up answer,” Raghavan said in comments posted in German. One of the fundamental tasks, he added, was to reduce this to a minimum.

Google was on the back foot after OpenAI, a startup that Microsoft is backing with around $10 billion (about Rs 82,500 crore), introduced ChatGPT in November, which has since wowed users with its surprisingly human-like responses to user queries.

Alphabet introduced Bard, its own chatbot, earlier this week, but the software shared inaccurate information in a promotional video in a gaffe that cost the company $100 billion (roughly Rs. 82.50,000 crore) at market value Wednesday.

Alphabet, which is still doing user testing on Bard, has not yet indicated when the app might go public.

“We obviously feel the urgency, but we also feel the great responsibility,” Raghavan said. “We certainly don’t want to mislead the public.”

Recently, Microsoft announced a multi-million dollar partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI to unveil new products. Google, on the other hand, is working on developing Bard while investing heavily in other AI startups.

The services offered by Google Bard and ChatGPT are similar. Users will need to type in a question, request, or give a prompt to receive a human-like response. Microsoft and Google plan to integrate artificial intelligence tools to bolster their Bing and Google Search search services, which account for a large portion of revenue.

© Thomson Reuters 2022