Google expresses concerns over ChatGPT's advancements

According to The New York Times, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin have discussed their response to ChatGPT, and have plans to release more than 20 AI products in the coming year, including a demonstration of their own search-based chatbot.

According to The New York Times, Google is planning to unveil a search engine with chatbot features in response to the recent launch of OpenAI's AI chatbot, ChatGPT. The news outlet also reported that Google is focusing on AI as a primary area of importance and has laid off more than 12,000 employees.

Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who remain controlling shareholders of Google's parent company Alphabet, have reportedly offered advice and pitched ideas to company leaders while discussing ChatGPT with executives. The launch of the AI search demo has no specific timeframe, but other projects from the presentation are set to debut at Google's annual I/O event in May.

According to a demo for a chatbot search, Google is prioritizing accuracy, safety, and the elimination of misinformation in its AI responses. They are also working on ways to speed up the review process for ensuring that their technology operates in a fair and ethical manner. The report, presented by a panel of executives including Jeff Dean, the head of Google's research and AI department, also highlighted several new product launches such as an image generation studio, an app for testing product prototypes, and a set of tools for businesses to create AI prototypes within a browser window called MakerSuite.

Additionally, the company is developing a code generation tool named PaLM-Coder 2, similar to Microsoft's GitHub Copilot software and another tool to aid in building apps for smartphones, named Colab + Android Studio.

In recent times, Google has been cautious when it comes to the launch of AI products. This was due to the company being at the center of a debate over the ethics of AI after firing two prominent researchers in the field, Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, who had criticized AI language models for amplifying biases in their training data and presenting false information as fact. Despite having advanced AI research, Google has only tested software with restrictive guardrails. The company's AI Test Kitchen app, for instance, provides access to image and text generation tools like OpenAI's DALL-E and ChatGPT, but with strict limitations on the requests that users can make.

In 2021, Google demonstrated some of its own AI products, including a non-public demo of a system similar to ChatGPT. However, with the launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT and warnings about Google's potential downfall, it seems the company is changing its approach. In the past, Google had avoided launching certain AI products to prevent "reputational damage." Now, it seems the company wants to avoid the reputation of being outdated.