How will Google and Microsoft AI chatbots affect us and how do we work? | Search engine

Google and Microsoft are clashing over the future of search by embracing the technology behind AI chatbots.

Google announced on Monday that it is testing Bard, a Microsoft-backed ChatGPT rival that has quickly become a sensation, and will roll it out to the public in the coming weeks.

And on Tuesday, Microsoft announced it was focusing more on artificial intelligence, increasing funding for new tools and integrating the technology into products, including its Bing search engine.

ChatGPT, developed by San Francisco-based OpenAI, has hit 100 million users since its public launch in November, becoming by some estimates the fastest-growing consumer app of all time.

Here are some questions about Google and Microsoft’s AI plans and their likely impact.

Why are Google and Microsoft using AI in search?

The reaction to ChatGPT shows that there is an appetite for AI-enhanced search and query answers that are more than just a link to a website. Microsoft clearly sees this as a competitive opportunity, as does Google judging by its quick response. Google also believes that users increasingly want to access information in a more natural and intuitive way (using tools such as Google Lens, which allows users to search using images and of text).

Dan Ives, an analyst at US financial services firm Wedbush Securities, said: “While Bing today only has around 9% of the search market, the further integration of this tool and these unique ChatGPT algorithms in the Microsoft search platform could result in significant shifts in market share. from Google. »

What is the technology behind Google chatbots and ChatGPT?

Both Bard and ChatGPT are based on so-called large language models. Google’s is called LaMDA, an acronym for “language model for dialogue applications”. These are types of neural networks, which mimic the underlying architecture of the brain in computational form. They receive large amounts of text from the Internet as part of a process that teaches them how to generate responses to text prompts. This allows ChatGPT to produce believable answers to questions about composing couplets, writing job applications, or, probably the biggest panic it’s created so far, college work.

How will Bard be different from ChatGPT?

Google has yet to make Bard publicly available, but it uses up-to-date information from the internet and would have been able to answer questions about the 12,000 layoffs announced by Google parent company Alphabet last month. ChatGPT’s data set – in the form of billions of words – goes all the way to 2021, but the chatbot is still in its search preview phase.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Bard could answer a question about how to explain new discoveries made by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a nine-year-old child. It can also inform users of the best strikers in football “currently” while providing training drills to emulate the best players. Screenshots provided by Google showed a neater interface than ChatGPT’s, but it’s still not publicly available, so direct comparisons with competing service OpenAI are difficult.

How will the technology behind Bard and ChatGPT change the search engines of Google and Microsoft?

Google says its search engine will use its latest artificial intelligence technologies, such as LaMDA, PaLM, image generator Imagen and music creator MusicLM. The example Pichai presented on Monday was a chatbot-like conversational answer to a question about whether it’s easier to learn guitar or piano. It appeared at the top of the search query instead of, for example, a link to a blog post or website. Again, Google hasn’t made this AI-powered search model public, so questions remain.

Microsoft detailed its redesign of Bing on Tuesday, announcing that it will be able to answer questions using online sources in a conversational style, as ChatGPT currently does. It will also provide AI-powered annotations for additional context and sources, perhaps reflecting some ChatGPT users’ concerns about the accuracy of some user responses.

“It’s a new day in research,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at an event announcing the products. “The race starts today, and we’re going to move and go fast.”

Will generative AI transform our professions?

Generative AI, or artificial intelligence that can create new content ranging from text to audio and images via user prompts, is already having an impact and fueling fears it could replace a range of jobs . BuzzFeed will use OpenAI technology to improve its quizzes and personalize certain content, according to a memo obtained by The Wall Street Journal.

BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said humans would provide ideas and “cultural currency” to any AI-powered creative process. In Hollywood, AI is being used to age actors while ITV has created a sketch show based on deepfake portrayals of celebrities.

Michael Wooldridge, professor of computer science at Oxford University, said some industries will feel a significant impact.

“Generative AI will have big implications in certain industries – those who write boilerplate copy for a living will soon feel the influence,” he said. “In web search, this will allow browsers to better understand what we’re looking for and present results in a way we can understand – as if we were asking a person rather than a machine.”

He added that ChatGPT and other similar systems have flaws and can go wrong, as users of the OpenAI chatbot have discovered.

“Treating them as sages is really not a good idea,” he says. “Until we know how to make them reliable, it’s not a good use of technology: it’s better to stick to the things it’s really good at, like summarizing a text and extracting the key points from it. .”