PARIS ― Google announced a slew of features powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), but a mistake in an ad caused its share price to tank.
The search engine giant is rushing into the space after the bot ChatGPT caught the imagination of web users around the world with its ability to generate essays, speeches and even exam papers in seconds.
Microsoft has announced a multibillion-dollar partnership with ChatGPT maker OpenAI and also unveiled new products, while Google tried to steal the march a day earlier by announcing its “Bard” alternative.
The bots are quickly being integrated into search engines and Google is battling to preserve its two-decade dominance of the web search industry.
But astronomers on Twitter quickly noticed that Google’s Bard had given out an error in an ad on Twitter touting its new technology.
In the ad, the bot was asked about what to tell a nine-year-old about discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope.
It incorrectly offered the response that the telescope was the first to take pictures of a planet outside Earth’s solar system, when that honor actually belongs to the European Very Large Telescope.
In a blog post according to Reuters, Alphabet Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said his company is opening a conversational AI service called Bard to test users for feedback, followed by a public release in the coming weeks.
He also said Google plans to add AI features to its search engine that synthesize material for complex queries, like whether learning guitar or piano is easier. Currently, Google presents text that exists elsewhere on the Web for questions where the answer is clear.
Google’s update for search, the timing of which it did not disclose, reflects how the company is bolstering its service while Microsoft is doing the same for Bing, embedding OpenAI’s capabilities in it.
How Google aims to differentiate Bard from OpenAI’s ChatGPT was unclear. Pichai said the new service draws on information from the internet; ChatGPT’s knowledge is up to date as of 2021.
“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our” AI, Pichai said.
Behind the new chatbot is LaMDA, Google’s AI that generated text with such skill that a company engineer last year called it sentient, a claim the technology giant and scientists widely dismissed.
In a demo of the service, Bard like its rival chatbot invites users to give it a prompt while warning its response may be inappropriate or inaccurate. It then bulleted three answers to a query about a space telescope’s discoveries, the demo showed.
Google is relying on a version of LaMDA that requires less computing power so it can serve more users and improve with their feedback, Pichai said.
ChatGPT at times has turned away users because of explosive growth, with UBS analysts reporting it had 57 million unique visitors in December outpacing potentially TikTok in adoption.
Google also plans to give technology tools, first powered by LaMDA and later by other AI, to creators and enterprises starting next month, Pichai said.
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