Google‘s Bard announcement last week was meant to indicate that the corporate has similar technology as the favored ChatGPT chatbot, though it still has a ways to go before becoming product-ready, Alphabet Chairman John Hennessy said Monday.
“I feel Google was hesitant to productize this since it didn’t think it was really ready for a product yet, but, I feel, as an illustration vehicle, it’s an excellent piece of technology,” said Hennessy, who has been the chairman of the Google parent company since 2018. He went on to say that he thinks generative artificial intelligence continues to be one to 2 years away from being a very great tool for the broader public.
Hennessy was speaking at a summit held by enterprise firm Celesta Capital in Mountain View, California. Hennessy has a protracted history in tech, including as a professor, researcher and company founder, and he also served because the president of Stanford University from 2000 to 2016.
Hennessy, who spoke on key trends for 2023, briefly touched on Google being caught within the sudden onrush of interest in ChatGPT and generative AI.
Last week, the corporate launched its response to ChatGPT in a conversation technology it is looking Bard. Nevertheless, the announcement had the looks of being rushed to match Microsoft’s inclusion of ChatGPT technology into its search engine, Bing, and investors punished Alphabet stock, sending it down 9% for the day.
Hennessy said Google was slow to roll out its ChatGPT competitor partly since it’s still giving unsuitable answers. Google is among the many most-used consumer products, and entities like YouTube and Search have sometimes provided inaccurate information prior to now.
That past, it seems, is inspiring caution at the corporate.
“You don’t need to place a system out that either says unsuitable things or sometimes says toxic things,” Hennessy said through the conference, echoing CEO Sundar Pichai’s response in December when employees asked if the corporate was falling behind ChatGPT. The tech industry needs to be “a bit of more careful in regards to the situation we create in civil society,” he acknowledged.
“I feel these models are still within the early days — determining easy methods to bring them right into a product stream and do it in a way that’s sensitive to correctness, in addition to issues like toxicity,” Hennessey told CNBC on Monday. “I feel the industry is scuffling with that.”
He added, “I don’t think Vint anticipated that folks would use the web to do evil things,” referring to Google executive Vint Cerf, who was one in every of the early developers of the web’s underlying technology.
“I’m from the age where, when you spam any individual, you were a social pariah. Now, I get 10 spam messages for each real message, so the world has modified, and we’ve got to take into consideration what role technology has in ensuring that we’ve got a functioning democracy, we’ve got individuals who can live together and work together, we don’t have hatred or a few of these other toxic things. I feel we actually do must work on that.”
Hennessy added that he’s been impressed with ChatGPT’s abilities, and that it’s moving faster than he anticipated.
“I’m impressed with two things — to start with the standard of the natural language ability each to interpret a question but in addition to answer something — the generative function. I’m impressed that it manages to, not less than at a reasonably superficial level, get a number of things right.”
He declined to comment specifically on the general public’s response to Google’s Bard announcement last week.
Hennessy later said it’s a great time for startups in Silicon Valley that may profit from recruiting talent from Big Tech through the current cycle of layoffs.
“Startups have such a vital role to play within the valley,” he said. “Certainly one of the nice things in regards to the valley is you can not rest in your laurels because some latest startup will come along and really provide you with a run in your money.”
