It was reported that after the AI dialogue and writing tool ChatGPT became popular, Google also released a competing product Bard, but it was accused of not being mature enough. Yesterday John Hennessy, chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, said that although the Bard product is still some way off from maturity, the reason why Google released it last week was to prove that the company has AI black technology similar to ChatGPT.
John Hennessy has served as Alphabet’s chairman since 2018. He said that Google already has the technology of AI processing natural language, but has been hesitant in terms of productization, thinking that this technology is not mature enough to develop a product that can be practically applied, but now, Bard has become a part of Google. Demonstration tools, showing their excellent AI technology.
John Hennessy said he believes that generative AI technology is still a year or two away from a mature product that the general public can use.
John Hennessy made the remarks Thursday at a summit hosted by U.S. venture capital firm Celesta Capital in Mountain View, California.
According to reports, John Hennessy himself has extensive experience in the technology industry, having served as a professor, researcher, and company founder. From 2000 to 2016, John Hennessy also served as President of the prestigious Stanford University in the United States.
At the summit, John Hennessy spoke about key tech industry trends for 2023. He revealed that the ChatGPT tool was released online, and then the content production AI technology caused a sensation, and Google was a little surprised and overwhelmed in the short term.
Last week, in response to ChatGPT, Google released Bard, an AI conversational tool. However, the release of this product was too hasty. The outside world believes that before Microsoft announced the integration of ChatGPT technology in Bing search, Google did this just to follow up with Microsoft.
Bard, who was technically immature, was punished by the capital market. On the day of the release, Alphabet’s stock price plummeted by nearly 10%.
John Hennessy revealed that the Google team did not release ChatGPT’s competing products in the past because the AI conversation tool was still giving wrong answers and the experience was not ideal.
Today’s Google owns a large number of Internet products used by massive users around the world, but in the past, products such as Youtube and web search have provided misinformation or harmful content. This experience has prompted Google to be more cautious when releasing new products.
At the summit, John Hennessy said that Google didn’t want to launch a half-baked product that might give the wrong answer, or even say something toxic.
It is worth mentioning that at an internal meeting last December, Google employees asked CEO Sundar Pichai whether the company was behind in releasing AI conversational tools. Pichai responded that the tech industry needed to be a little more cautious about the impact new technologies might have on civil society.
John Hennessy said on Monday that the language model behind the AI dialogue tool is still in its early stages, and developers need to study how to integrate the language model into the product to improve the accuracy of the answer, and at the same time beware of the output of toxic information, “I think the entire industry We are still working through this difficulty.”
The executive said that Vint Cerf, the inventor of the Internet, would never have imagined that some unscrupulous people would use the Internet to do bad things. Cerf was a former Google executive who developed important technologies underlying the Internet and is sometimes referred to as the “Father of the Internet.”
John Hennessy said that he came from the early days of the Internet. Back then, if he sent spam to others, he might be regarded as “social scum”, but now, for every real email he receives, he will receive ten spam emails, so The whole world has changed, and now people need to think about the role new technologies play in the normal functioning of society. People live together, work together, so new technology can’t create hate, can’t create toxic information, and the tech industry needs to work hard to ensure that.
The executive mentioned that he was impressed with the conversational capabilities ChatGPT has shown, and that ChatGPT has matured faster than he expected.
He said that ChatGPT surprised him in two ways. First, whether it is analyzing the content of human conversations or generating answers (that is, AI generation technology), ChatGPT has demonstrated very good natural language processing capabilities. Second, at least on the surface, Many of ChatGPT’s answers are correct.
John Hennessy declined to comment on the mixed public response to Google’s announcement of Bard last week.
On the same day, John Hennessy also talked about the large layoffs in the US technology industry. He said that the current technology giants have entered a cycle of layoffs. In fact, for many of Google’s new startups, this provides a good opportunity to recruit outstanding technology talents.
He said that in Silicon Valley, start-up companies play an important role. An important survival rule in Silicon Valley is that you cannot lie flat under the glory and aura of the past. Better to die.
