The buzz around the artificial intelligence chatbot, which was released to the public at the end of November and quickly turned into a sensation on social media, is getting a lot of attention at work.
Some of them are wondering where Google is in the race to create a bot that can answer questions. The company has long promoted itself as a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence. The language model for dialogue applications is what LaMDA is about.
At a recent all-hands meeting, employees raised concerns about the company's competitive edge in artificial intelligence, given the sudden popularity of a startup that is backed by Microsoft.
One of the top-rated questions that came up at last week's meeting was "Is this a missed opportunity for the company?"
The answer to the question was that the company has similar capabilities but that the cost if something goes wrong would be more.
Billions of people across the globe use the search engine, while the number of users of the chat service has crossed 1 million.
"This really strikes a need that people seem to have but it's also important to realize these models have certain type of issues."
A person from the company didn't reply to a request for comment.
On Monday, Morgan Stanley published a report on the subject, looking at whether or not the threat to the internet giant is real. According to Brian Nowak, the bank's lead analyst, the bearish case for the company is that language models could take market share and disrupt their position as the entry point for people on the internet.
While creating behavioral change is a huge hurdle for any new and competitive technology, Nowak said the firm is still confident in the position of the company. He wrote that "we look for further products to come over time."
Sundar Pichai speaks onstage during the first day of Vox Media's 2022 Code Conference in Beverly Hills, California."This is an area where we need to be bold and responsible so we have to balance that," Pichai stated at the meeting.
Users should be careful with how much they rely on the answers they're getting because of the limitations of the service.
It's not a good idea to rely on it for important things right now. We have a lot of work to do on robustness and truthfulness.
It is not possible for a company with a market cap of over a billion dollars to have that luxury. Dean told employees that the company has much more risk than a small startup and is moving more conservatively.
Dean said that they are looking to get these things out into real products and into things that are more prominently featuring the language model. We need to get this right.
For search-like applications, the factuality issues are important and for other applications, bias and toxicity are also paramount.
Dean said the technology isn't where it needs to be for a broad roll out.
Dean said that the artificial intelligence could make things up. "If they're not sure about something, they'll just tell you, you know elephants are the animals that lay the largest eggs or whatever," he joked.
During the Pandemic, people would chat with the system for a while and have these engaging conversations at lunchtime, according to Dean.
There will be a point of inflection in the way that artificial intelligence is used for conversations and searches.
He said that we can ship new stuff.
The employees had other concerns.
The company grew at a slower rate than in the previous three years, except for one period during the Pandemic. The company's overall ad business grew faster than search-related revenue did.
At the meeting, Pichai read aloud a question that was concerning to him, "With headlines like 'Google search is dying' it's not what it used to be, how concerning is this to you?" What is the common thread behind these concerns, and what can we do about them?
Pichai said that he had read all the articles. The progress has been great, but it's also true that people take everything we do for granted.
A senior vice president who runs the Knowledge and Information organization responded. Raghavan said in July that Tiktok and other visual platforms are starting to eat into the market share of search engines.
Raghavan told employees that they have to answer and model those questions. He said that users' expectations keep evolving. We need to address the needs.
Estimates show that the company holds at least a majority of the search market. In a market where it's been accused of operating a monopoly, executives have been more willing to speak out.
Right now, the company is very well positioned.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
