ChatGPT causes a stir for for its ability to programming code within seconds

Google announced Monday that it will release a conversational chatbot called Bard, setting up an artificial intelligence conversation with Microsoft that has invested billions in the creators of ChatGPT, a popular language program that robustly mimics human text.

ChatGPT, created by the San Francisco company OpenAI, has caused a stir with its ability to write essays, poems or software code on demand in seconds, raising fears of fraud or the entire profession becoming obsolete.

Microsoft announced last month that it supports OpenAI and has begun integrating ChatGPT functionality into its Teams platform, hoping to adapt the app to its Office and Bing search engine.

The potential inclusion of Bing has sparked Google and speculation that the world’s leading search engine could face unprecedented competition from an AI-powered rival.

According to media reports, the instant success of ChatGPT has been called a “code red” threat for Google, while the founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page – who left several years ago – were brought back to the ideas and accelerated the response.

Pressure to act was increased by weak earnings reports last week from Google parent company Alphabet, which fell short of investor expectations. The company announced last month that it was cutting 12,000 jobs as it focused more on AI projects.

Google’s announcement came on the eve of an AI-related launch event by Microsoft, a further sign that the two tech giants will be battling it out for the technology, also known as generative AI.

“Generative AI is a game changer and just as the rise of the Internet overwhelmed the internet giants that came before it (AOL, CompuServe, etc.), it has the potential to change the competitive dynamics of search. and information,” he said. Rob Enderle, independent technology analyst. .

“Google is still living off the fact that their search engine is the most used, it can change that, put them in history,” he added.

‘Quality answers’ –
In his Monday blog post, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Google’s AI Bard conversation should be tested with a plan to make it more available “in the coming weeks.”

Google’s Bard is based on LaMDA, the company’s language model for a conversational application framework, and has been in development for several years.

“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of knowledge of the world with the energy, intelligence and creativity of our leading linguistic models,” Pichai said.

“It relies on information from the web to provide new and advanced answers,” he added, pointing out that the app will provide up-to-date answers, which ChatGPT cannot do.

Before the emergence of ChatGPT, which was released in late November, Google had been reluctant to launch its own language-based AI, fearing the reputational risk of releasing a technology it wasn’t ready for.

Researchers using language models similar to Bard or ChatGPT have demonstrated the technology’s ability to spread misinformation or nonsense on a massive scale.

In November, Facebook owner Meta was forced to cancel the publication of its flagship language model Galactica after three days when users shared its biased and inaccurate results on social media within hours of its release.

Pichai stressed that the responses provided by Bard “will achieve the highest level of quality, security and grounding in real-world information.”

And like ChatGPT, Bard would generate its responses from a smaller version of its main language model to reduce computational power and reach a wider audience.

Especially for its upcoming battle with Microsoft, Google also said that users will soon see AI-powered features in its search engine.

New-style responses would “form complex information and multiple perspectives into easily digestible formats,” Pichai said.

AI-enhanced search engines to generate “will provide structured answers to questions and will not relink,” Thierry Poibeau, of the CNRS research center in Paris, told AFP.

But bots like ChatGPT “also generate incorrect answers, which annoys the search engine,” Poibeau said.