eBusiness Weekly
The hype around chatbots like ChatGPT has only grown in recent weeks, but one of the creators of the internet is preaching caution amid a perceived gold rush around AI.
Vint Cerf, widely recognized as a “father of the internet”, warned people against hastily investing in conversational AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard simply because they’re “cool” and buzzed about.
While speaking at a conference in Mountain View, California, CNBC reported that Cerf said AI chatbots also have “an ethical issue” that he hopes people will think about before investing in the technology.
“Everybody’s talking about ChatGPT or Google’s version of that and we know it doesn’t always work the way we would like it to,” Cerf said, according to CNBC.
He also said people have to “remember” that some humans using new technology aren’t always genuine, and “will seek to do that which is their benefit and not yours”, so investors have to “be thoughtful about how we use these technologies,” CNBC reported.
“If you think ‘man, I can sell this to investors because it’s a hot topic and everyone will throw money at me,’ don’t do that,” Cerf reportedly said.
“Be thoughtful. You were right that we can’t always predict what’s going to happen with these technologies and to be honest with you, most of the problem is people — that’s why we people haven’t changed in the last 400 years let alone the last 4 000.”
Cerf, who is vice president and chief internet evangelist at Google, is known as one of the “fathers of the internet” because he co-designed some of the internet’s architecture. As chief internet evangelist, Cerf “contributes to global policy development and continued spread of the Internet,” according to Google Research.
He told the conference audience that he asked one of the chatbots to add an emoji at the end of a sentence, but it didn’t, then apologised to him after he called it out. He said he asked a chatbot to give him a biography on himself, but its answer had errors, CNBC reported.
Cerf reportedly said engineers, like himself, should hold themselves responsible for correcting errors, adding that learning “how to minimise the worst-case potential is very important”.
After OpenAI released its viral AI chatbot ChatGPT in November, tech giants like Google and Microsoft have joined the competition to release their own AI chatbots into the race. Google even issued a “code red” to employees after ChatGPT’s launch over concerns it could pose a threat to Google’s search engine.
A day before Microsoft was set to release its “new Bing” in collaboration with OpenAI, Google announced its AI chatbot, Bard, which CEO Sundar Pichai said is “an experimental conversational AI service”. Bard, which was released last Monday, is open to “trusted testers” now, but Pichai said it will be made available more widely in coming weeks.
However, some Google employees have reportedly criticised Bard’s launch, calling it “rushed” and “botched”.
Microsoft launched its “new Bing” last Tuesday which it said is “more powerful than ChatGPT” — a claim Insider has begun testing. The revamped search engine is supposed to improve answers and has a chat extension for users to “talk” to Bing to ask it questions. — Business Insider
. . . rise poses threat to Google: Bill Gates
Bill Gates
Bill Gates — the cofounder of tech giant Microsoft — said Google’s profits from its search engine are likely to fall in the future because the company he cofounded has been able to move rapidly on artificial intelligence.
Gates was speaking on a Monday episode of “In Good Company”, a podcast hosted by Norwegian sovereign wealth fund boss Nicolai Tangen, when he said: “Google has owned all of the search profits, so the search profits will be down, and their share of it may be down because Microsoft has been able to move fairly fast on that one.”
For context, Google posted US$224 billion in advertising revenues in 2022 — far dwarfing Microsoft’s US$18 billion in advertising revenues.
Earlier in February, Gates had told Forbes that AI is “every bit as important as the PC, as the internet”. On the podcast, he admitted to being surprised by how the development of AI accelerated in the last year but said it will be the “biggest thing in this decade.”
His comments came two weeks after Microsoft unveiled an AI-powered version of its Bing search engine, which pits itself as a challenger to Google’s dominance in the search space.
Google has dominated search for the past two decades and according to web analytics service Statcounter, it accounts for about 93 percent of the global search-engine market, while Bing accounts for about 3 percent.
Just as Microsoft launched Bing, Alphabet — Google’s parent company — also unveiled an AI service called Bard. Both the new Bing and Bard are open to test users.
While Gates said on the podcast he was “not sure” there’ll be a winner from the AI race, at least one prominent analyst — Wedbush’s Dan Ives— said Microsoft is “leading the pack” in the AI race right now.
What Gates eventually envisions for AI’s integration into search engines is a “personal agent” that understands the requirements and style of users — replacing the need for separate services from different tech companies like what’s happening now with Google dominating search, Amazon owning shopping, Microsoft owning productivity tools, and Apple owning the devices market.
“A decade from now, we won’t think of those businesses as separate, because the AI will know you so well that when you’re buying gifts or planning trips, it won’t care if Amazon has the best price, if someone else has a better price — you won’t even need to think about it,” Gates said on the podcast.
“So it’s a pretty dramatic potential reshuffling of how tech markets look.” — Business Insider
