Search engine executives have sounded the general alarm over the progress of OpenAI’s artificial intelligence.
For several weeks, ChatGPT has amazed the world with the relevance of its results, but has also scared off some players in artificial intelligence, starting with Google.
A very powerful tool that creates panic at Google
The OpenAI chatbot improves very quickly and makes it possible to carry on a conversation in a completely natural way. Everything is not perfect of course, but artificial intelligence delivers excellent results, as the Qwant search engine joked in a tweet.
ChatGPT could also be used in other application areas, such as bug tracking. Questions posed to artificial intelligence, once sufficiently trained, could allow developers to spot security flaws in their software.
Enthusiasm does not seem as shared on the side of Google teams. According to information from New York Timeswhich obtained internal documents and records, the search engine’s executives would be panicked by the progress made by OpenAI, when AI is now a major activity of the company.
Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet, parent company of Google, would have sounded the alarm and demanded major progress for the next few months. The objective is to present new products from May 2023, during Google I/O, the conference organized by the web giant to present its software advances to developers. The Dall-E or Stable Diffusion automatic image creation tools are also in the company’s sights.
The search engine torn between its technological advances and the safeguard of its business model
However, Google has not been idle in recent years and has announced the development of LaMDA, a chatbot, again very impressive, which can interact naturally with a user.
However, Google teams are reluctant to launch such a tool on the market. Meta and Microsoft have already broken their teeth on this subject, with software solutions that quickly showed their limits, and uttered insults or racist remarks after only a few hours of conversation. No question therefore for the search engine to damage its reputation with such a project.
The other brake on Google remains its business model. If the company succeeds in offering such a powerful artificial intelligence, capable of giving the right search result on the first try, the advertising links present on the search page will lose their value. These represent the majority of Google’s revenue each year, and must be preserved. Even if it means making the search a little less efficient and natural.
Source : New York Times
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