The James Webb Space Telescope cost $10bn (£8.3bn) to build but left Google with losses of more than $160bn after the search engine’s new chatbot incorrectly answered a question about it. .
Google and Microsoft announced plans for AI-enhanced search this week, taking the AI space race into a new phase. However, the release of the former’s new chatbot, Bard, failed badly when the bug appeared in a demo.
Microsoft-backed competitor ChatGPT was asked about the telescope and one of the responses displayed said it “took the first images of a planet outside our own solar system.” experts they quickly realized the inaccuracy – as do investors.
Shares of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, lost $163 billion in value on Wednesday and Thursday. The company remains a $1 trillion-plus behemoth, largely due to its dominance in search. But for how long?
Microsoft announced Tuesday that it was using the technology behind ChatGPT, developed by San Francisco-based startup OpenAI, to improve its Bing search engine and Edge web browser.
The company, which announced a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI last month, said the technology, based on a more powerful version of ChatGPT, would help users refine queries more easily, deliver more relevant and up-to-date results and make shopping easier. . . He said the new Bing would be publicly available within several weeks, and users can also join a waiting list for early access.
Google knew it had to respond after the OpenAI deal and the great success of ChatGPT. He said Monday that Bard was undergoing specialized tests and would become more publicly available in the coming weeks.
Sundar Pichai, Google’s CEO, said the technology behind Bard would soon be integrated into its search engine, citing the example of asking Google in a new guise whether the piano or guitar is easier to learn. Unfortunately, it was the telescope’s response that garnered the most attention, combined with a disappointing presentation on Google’s latest AI-powered search plans in Paris on Wednesday.
Dan Ives, an analyst at US financial services firm Wedbush Securities, said the week had been a “big success story” for Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, but that Google’s event in Paris and Bard’s stumble they had left the company with “more questions than answers.” .
However, he added: “While it initially looks like Google rushed Bard to market with the Microsoft ChatGPT deal and event upstaged by the company, this race will be a long one.”
It’s also unlikely that Microsoft will escape unscathed from James Webb-type errors, experts said. In fact, ChatGPT users have encountered inaccuracies when using the chatbot, whose technology underpins the new look for Bing and other Microsoft products, such as Teams.
Experts have warned that the large language models, which are the basis of Bard and ChatGPT, are prone to errors due to the way they are built. These models are fed data sets comprising billions of words that train the AI to generate plausible-sounding answers to queries. Operating in a similar way to predictive text, they build a model to predict the most likely word or sentence that will come after the user’s input.
“ChatGPT is a phrase predictor,” says Dr. Andrew Rogoyski of the Institute for Human-Centered AI at the University of Surrey. “It’s a system that has memorized a billion books so it can guess what comes after the question you ask. Everything he says is essentially a rehash of something that has been said before by a human. He’s not remotely smart. There are much smarter and more useful artificial intelligence systems operating robots, diagnosing diseases, or driving a car.”
However, the huge interest in ChatGPT, which signed up more than 100 million users in two months, shows considerable public appetite for an AI-enhanced search experience. Chatbot fans have praised its ability to summarize documents, tidy up prose, and write code (among many other things), while journalists who first saw the new AI-powered Bing were impressed.
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In one case, it offers more nuanced answers than ChatGPT to questions like: “Why did Russia start a war in Ukraine?” According to the Platformer newsletter, the new Bing also gives users the option to reply in certain tones (professional, casual, enthusiastic, informative, or funny) and in different formats, including paragraphs, emails, or blogs.
He Bing New Look FAQ Page He’s also candid about potential mistakes, stating, “AI can make mistakes” and, “You may see answers that sound convincing but are incomplete, inaccurate, or inappropriate.”
Google said the telescope’s error underscored the need for the “rigorous testing” Bard is undergoing before a wider release to the public.
But if public interest in chatbot-enhanced search holds up, as demonstrated by the success of ChatGPT, then Microsoft has a big target to aim for. Google dominates the global search market with a 91% share, according to the Internet data firm. SimilarWeb, with Bing at just 3%. The Chinese search engine Baidu has also put its own chatbot in the race, called “Ernie bot”.
According to Microsoft, each percentage point gained in market share, presumably from Google, represents an additional $2 billion in ad revenue for the company, referring to the lucrative business of ads placed in search results. This week, Microsoft said Bing’s AI-powered ability to understand queries “deeperly” and gain insights about users with “deep conversational engagement” would be a giveaway for advertisers. Google obviously agrees.
There’s a big gap to bridge between companies: In its most recent quarterly results, Microsoft reported $3.2bn in search and news advertising revenue, while Google generated $42.6bn in search revenue. Chatbots also require a lot of processing power, so there are also cost implications for any AI-driven market take, as well as defending a market leadership position.
Google has invested heavily in AI and its use is everywhere in its products (in Google Translate for example). Alphabet also owns DeepMind, a leading UK-based AI research company. Google remains in a strong position.
“I don’t think the new version of Bing that takes advantage of the large language model technology will prove to be a serious threat to Google’s search business. Google has great language model technology that is at least on par with Microsoft and OpenAI,” says Mark Riedl, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
However, he adds: “Microsoft has accomplished a great feat in turning search technology back into a two-way race virtually overnight. It will be interesting to see how things play out.”
