John Hennessy, Alphabet’s president, said Google was hesitant to use its Bard AI in a product because it wasn’t “really ready,” according to CNBC. Google unveiled its Bard AI last week amid strong interest in competitor ChatGPT. But a promo for Google Bard had a factual error – which sent Alphabet shares down 9% in one day. Something is loading.
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Google’s experimental AI chatbot Bard didn’t get the warm response it might have expected – a promotional ad for the product had an embarrassing factual error that hurt the company’s stock price and drew criticism from company employees for being “rushed” and “sloppy” work.
Today, the chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, says the tech giant may have even been hesitant to launch the technology.
“I think Google was hesitant to produce this because they didn’t think they were really ready for a product yet, but I think as a demo vehicle it’s great technology,” John said. Hennessy during a keynote at TechSurge. conference on Monday, CNBC reported.
He added that Google was slow to introduce Bard because he always gave wrong answers. Google unveiled Bard amid strong interest in rival chatbot ChatGPT, and just a day before Microsoft rolled out its AI-powered search engine Bing which is built using technology from OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT.
Hennessy also warned on Monday that AI chatbots are still in their early stages of development. And he’s not alone — Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman have expressed similar concerns.
“I think these models are still in their infancy – figuring out how to integrate them into a product flow and do it in a way that is sensitive to accuracy, as well as issues like toxicity,” Hennessey said. to CNBC on Monday. “I think the industry struggles with that.”
Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s search engine boss, also told the Welt Am Sonntag newspaper on Saturday that AI chatbots can generate false but convincing answers in a phenomenon known as “hallucination”.
Google has learned the hard way how badly this can go. Alphabet’s share price plummeted 9% last Wednesday after reports emerged that it gave an incorrect answer to a question about NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.
At the conference, Hennessy declined to comment specifically on the public’s reaction to Google’s Bard, according to CNBC.
Google did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment sent outside of normal business hours.