On February 8th, Google held a live event titled “Live from Paris” to present its plans to transform the way users search, explore and interact with information. At the event, the ambitious Google Bard project was shown to compete against ChatGPT, something that was previously speculated to be announced at their annual I/O event in May. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, recently revealed at the company’s earnings conference that these plans have been in the works for some time.
Until now, Google had been cautious with chatbots, and its artificial intelligence platform LaMDA was only available for limited testing. Last summer, the company fired a senior engineer for suggesting that the chatbot was self-aware.
Competencia fuerte en la inteligencia artificial
Strong competition in artificial intelligence
In response, Microsoft is also trying to integrate artificial intelligence into its products, including the Bing search engine, after heavily investing in OpenAI. They have since declared plans to incorporate ChatGPT into their Teams software, allowing it to summarize meetings and more, but the functions are only accessible with a premium plan.
Some emerging internet companies have implemented chatbot technology into their search engines, although not to the same extent as massive companies like Google and Microsoft. For example, Neeva and You.com use artificial intelligence to offer brief answers to queries, as well as cite the source of the information. A frequent complaint regarding ChatGPT is the lack of visibility of its responses, which present a sense of certainty in what they claim even when they are incorrect or misleading.
According to CNBC, Google is analyzing certain functions with its staff as part of a “red code” plan to compete with ChatGPT. This analysis includes a chatbot called “Apprentice Bard” and desktop search designs that could be used in a question-and-answer style.
“In the near future, users will be able to interact with our state-of-the-art language model as a complement to search, in a proactive and novel way”, proclaimed Sundar Pichai, who is leading Google, mentioning Google’s conversation technology LaMDA, or Linguistic Model for Dialogue Applications.
