'It's Super Important We Get This Right': Despite ChatGPT's Popularity, Don't Expect a Google-Built Competitor Right Away Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and another executive reportedly discussed the stakes Google faces when it comes to replacing search with artificial intelligence in an all-hands meeting.
By Gabrielle Bienasz Edited by Jessica Thomas
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Would you rather search for information on Google or just ask a chatbot that gives you the answers?
The question has begun to emerge on the heels of the popularity of ChatGPT, a bot that's gone somewhat viral in the tech world.
ChatGPT is a free tool from OpenAI that has been trained to chat with people and "answer follow-up questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests." It is a service you can essentially use to chat back and forth and ask questions from the informational to the more profound — and get interesting answers.
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ChatGPT's popularity has naturally made chatting AI a topic of interest in the tech world — it came up at a Google all-hands meeting last week, according to CNBC.
Google products ERT, MUM and LaMDA have similar capabilities to ChatGPT, The Verge noted. But it's decided to not make those technologies available to the public.
In the town hall meeting, an employee reportedly questioned if that decision is a "missed opportunity for Google, considering we've had LaMDA for a while?"
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and Jeff Dean, who leads Google AI, responded to the employee and others who agreed, per CNBC.
Dean said Google has to think and act "more conservatively than a small startup" considering the technology's "reputational risk."
"We are absolutely looking to get these things out into real products and into things that are more prominently featuring the language model rather than under the covers, which is where we've been using them to date… But, it's super important we get this right," he said.
Pichai added that the company has "a lot" in its plans for AI and language-type technology in 2023, per CNBC. "This is an area where we need to be bold and responsible, so we have to balance that," he said.
ChatGPT has already made some public missteps. One user got it to write the following lyrics: "If you see a woman in a lab coat, She's probably just there to clean the floor / But if you see a man in a lab coat, Then he's probably got the knowledge and skills you're looking for," per Bloomberg.
OpenAI has been updating ChatGPT to attempt to prevent biased responses in real-time. The tool is already wildly popular — it got more than a million users in five days, OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman Tweeted.
