Reports say Google has become alarmed over the popularity and accuracy of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Google is ramping up its focus on AI while laying off 12,000 workers.

Popular ChatGPT Prompts Google Executives to Make Big Changes

Google has long taken a conservative approach to AI and high-tech products. They have been cautious with rolling out new ideas under the Google name. Now as Seeflection.com reported a few weeks ago, Google has alarm bells going off at their headquarters according to an article from theverge.com.

The recent launch of OpenAI’s AI chatbot ChatGPT has raised alarms within Google, according to a report from The New York Times. Now, the Times says Google has plans to:

“Demonstrate a version of its search engine with chatbot features this year” and unveil more than 20 projects powered by artificial intelligence.

As recently as December, we’d heard Google execs were worried that despite investing heavily in AI technology, moving too fast to roll it out could harm the company’s reputation. But now Google announced it’s laying off more than 12,000 employees and focusing on AI.

There’s no specific timeframe mentioned for the launch of Google’s AI search demo, but it may debut during its annual I/O event in May, which has previously launched features like Duplex and Google Glass.

Another aspect of Google and other high-tech corporations putting so much effort into developing chatbots is that there may finally be a threat to what was once thought to be safe from humans being replaced with AI. That is to say, the creative writers in the job market.

Other occupations that require repetitive movements such as a factory production line have seen a lot of robots driven by AI replacing human workers.

A New Google

In recent years, Google has carefully released new AI products. The company found itself at the center of a debate over AI ethics after firing two prominent researchers in the field, Timnit Gebru, and Margaret Mitchell. The pair laid out criticisms of AI language models, noting challenges like their propensity to amplify biases in their training data and present false information as fact.

Although Google’s AI research is thought to be as advanced as that of other prominent tech companies, it’s only tested software with particularly restrictive guardrails. The firm’s AI Test Kitchen app, for example, offers access to image and text generation tools similar to OpenAI’s DALL-E and ChatGPT. However, Google heavily restricts the requests users can make of these systems. The company already showed off some of its own chat-heavy AI products, including a nonpublic demo in 2021 of a system similar to ChatGPT.

With the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, though, the company has switched into high gear. In the past, Google has said it’s avoided launching certain AI products because of the potential “reputational damage.” Now, it seems the reputation it wants to avoid is one of being behind the times.

There is a lot of behind the scenes of Google information in this article. Essentially Google has all the tools it needs to stay relevant. Now it just needs to use them and show the public Google still has the magic we all have come to expect when we have a question that needs to be answered: “Just Google it.”

read more at theverge.com