GoogleAlphabet’s Bard’s announcement last week was meant to show the company has technology similar to its popular ChatGPT chatbot, but it still has a long way to go to market, Alphabet said. Chairman John Hennessy said Monday.
Mr. Hennessy, who served as chairman, said, “I think Google hesitated to commercialize it because they decided it wasn’t ready for commercialization yet, but I think it’s a great technology for a demonstration vehicle.” Since 2018 he has been one of Google’s parent companies. He said he still believes it will be a year or two before generative artificial intelligence becomes a truly useful tool for the wider public.
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Hennessy spoke at a summit hosted by venture firm Celesta Capital in Mountain View, California. Hennessy has a long history in technology as a professor, researcher and company founder, and from 2000 until 2016 she also served as president of Stanford University.
Talking about key trends for 2023, Hennessy briefly touched on Google being caught up in the surge of interest in ChatGPT and generative AI.
Last week, the company began supporting ChatGPT with a conversational technology called Bard. But the announcement seemed rushed, coinciding with Microsoft’s incorporation of ChatGPT technology into its search engine Bing, and investors punished Alphabet’s stock, sending its stock down 9% that day. .
Hennessy said one of the reasons Google has slowed the rollout of ChatGPT competitors is because they’re still giving the wrong answers. Google is one of the most used consumer products, and entities like YouTube and Search have sometimes provided inaccurate information in the past.
Its past seems to call attention to the company.
“I don’t want to create a system where people say the wrong things and sometimes they say toxic things,” Hennessy said at a conference, asking employees in December if they were lagging behind ChatGPT. The tech industry “needs to pay a little more attention to the situation we bring to civil society,” he conceded.
“I think these models are still in the early stages. We’re working them into the product stream and figuring out how to do it in a way that’s sensitive to issues like accuracy and toxicity,” Hennessey told CNBC on Monday. Told. The industry suffers from it. ”
Referring to Google executive Vint Cerf, one of the early developers of the technology underlying the Internet, he said, “Vint never expected people to use the Internet to do bad things. I think,” he added.
“I come from a time when spamming someone would make you a pariah. Now I get 10 spam messages for every real message. We need to think about the roles we have: To ensure we have a functioning democracy, we will have people we can live with and work with, and we will not have hate or anything else harmful. I think we really need to work on that.
Hennessy added that he has been impressed with ChatGPT’s capabilities and is moving faster than expected.
“I was impressed by two things. First and foremost, the quality of the natural language ability to respond to something rather than just interpreting a query: the generative ability. At least on a fairly superficial level, I am impressed that you are doing a lot of things right.”
He declined to specifically comment on public reaction to Google’s Bard announcement last week.
Hennessy later said it’s an opportunity for Silicon Valley startups to profit from hiring talent from Big Tech during the current cycle of layoffs.
“Startups have an important role to play in the Valley,” he said. ”