Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, has announced that the company will soon offer more competent AI models in response to criticism of his ChatGPT rival, Bard.
According to Pichai, Bard is now competing with "more powerful automobiles" like a "souped-up Civic," but Google has "more capable models" that will be made available in the upcoming days.
He made these comments in an interview with the NYT's Hard Fork podcast.
"We knew when we were putting Bard out we wanted to be careful," Pichai stated. "Since this was the first time we were putting out, we wanted to see what type of queries we would get. We obviously positioned it carefully."
More powerful PaLM (Pathways Language Model) versions of the Bard chatbot will be released "over the course of next week," l Google CEO added. That will imply that Bard significantly improves in various areas, including reasoning and coding.
Calculative approach
Pichai's general attitude was a mix of caution over trying out what Bard could achieve and enthusiasm regarding where it might ultimately lead. These "very, very strong technologies" may be tailored to businesses and individuals, according to Pichai.
The Google CEO also addressed questions about data protection and the rapid advancement of AI engines like Bard and ChatGPT. The development of artificial intelligence should be put on hold for six months, according to some of the biggest names in technology.
Pichai said in the podcast that he supports these kinds of debates and wants to see governments enact laws because AI is too crucial an area not to control. Moreover, the area is too crucial to lack proper regulation. I'm delighted that these discussions are starting now.
This most recent podcast interview exemplifies the multitude of important questions surrounding AI at the moment, including how it will affect data protection, the types of professions it may eliminate, the effect it will have on publishers if Google and Bing become one-stop shops, and so forth.
To be fair to Pichai, he handled those issues in a very thoughtful manner, but that does not necessarily mean that all of our concerns about AI will be allayed. We're in the midst of a significant change in the way we live our lives and access information online.
Pichai acknowledged that the technology "has the capacity to bring harm in a deep sense" but is also "going to be incredibly beneficial". While it's important to recognise this, businesses like Google are more motivated by financial success than by any sense of moral obligation.
