Google’s search engine CEO warns of risks and ‘hallucinations’ in AI chatbots in an interview.
In a newspaper interview published on Saturday, the CEO of Google’s search engine warned against the perils of artificial intelligence in chatbots, as Google parent firm Alphabet struggles to compete with blockbuster software ChatGPT.
“This sort of artificial intelligence we’re talking about right now might occasionally lead to something we term hallucination,” Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s senior vice president and director of Google Search, told the German daily Welt am Sonntag.
“This then manifests itself in such a manner that a computer produces a persuasive but entirely fabricated answer,” Raghavan wrote in remarks published in German. One of the most important objectives, he continued, was to keep this to a minimum.
Google has been put on the defensive after OpenAI, a startup backed by Microsoft to the tune of $10 billion, released ChatGPT in November, which has subsequently astonished users with its startlingly human-like replies to user inquiries. Alphabet Inc unveiled Bard, its chatbot, earlier this week, but the software provided incorrect information in a promotional video, causing the company’s market worth to drop by $100 billion on Wednesday. Alphabet, which is still doing user testing on Bard, has not stated when the app would be made available to the public. “Obviously, we feel the hurry, but we also feel a tremendous amount of duty,” Raghavan explained. “We don’t want to mislead the public in any way.”
