After the debut of Google's version of ChatGPT, what can be turned over against the wind

OpenAI came out of nowhere, catching the veteran tech giant Google by surprise.

Actor Matthew McConaughey tells us in "Interstellar" that Murphy's Law means that "what can happen, sooner or later."

However, Google has "taught a lesson" to the actor with practical actions, and Murphy's Law refers to that "what will go wrong will always go wrong", and the more urgent the more wrong.

"Bard is not a search engine"

On the evening of February 8, Beijing time, Google officially released the "self-developed version of ChatGPT" Bard, but during the demonstration, Bard exposed his disadvantages: easy to fabricate false facts.

Bard said that the James Webb Telescope (JWST) took the first picture of an exoplanet, but this was not the case, the first exoplanet was taken in 2004 by the European Extremely Large Telescope funded by the European Southern Observatory, when JWST was still under development.

So this is obviously a false fact

Google's stock price plummeted that night, losing nearly $100 billion in market value. To this day, Google still pays the price for this misstep.

Recently, according to a Google plenary call audio obtained by CNBC, employees criticized leadership, accusing Google's first public demonstration of being "hasty and clumsy", rushed, and employees left messages on Google's internal forum Dory, most of which were not friendly, more like questions to management.

Jack Krawczyk, Bard's head of product, made an unexpected response at the meeting:

Bard is not a search engine. This is the collaborative AI service-oriented experiment we've been talking about. The magic of what we've found while using this product is that this creative companion helps you become a spark of your imagination, explore your curiosity, and so on

He added, "For those who want to search with it, Google has built a new feature for internal use called Search It."

▲ His introduction on the LinkedIn page is "Machine Teacher"

It means that in the future, Google will further combine artificial intelligence with the old search engine, but for now, retrieving certain things is not the original intention of Bard's existence.

To some extent, Jack Krawczyk defended Bard's mistakes, but if you think about it, even if Bard is not a search engine, that shouldn't be an excuse for his mistakes.

In principle, Bard and ChatGPT are both chatbots: after receiving a large number of text corpus training, according to the user's questions, and then give feedback, and this feedback is random and tendentious, everything depends on the training data of the model.

So it's not hard to expect that if ChatGPT has had problems, Bard will repeat it.

But fortunately, Bard is still in closed beta, Google still has enough time to debug, to optimize, Google to worry about not to have problems after the product release, recently grabbed the limelight Bing Chat (Bing Chat), is Google's previous experience.

Microsoft, which uses ChatGPT, is not so good

Microsoft invested billions of dollars in model training with OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT, earlier this year, and announced that it would integrate ChatGPT into Bing's Bing search system.

Just a day before Google released Bard, Microsoft delivered on that promise: user ecstasy, market reaction, and OpenAI in the limelight.

However, when users actually use Bing Chat, they find that it is actually a semi-finished product, and everything is not as beautiful as imagined.

Unobtrusive, nonsense, the newly launched Bing Chat has shown its sensational "character" little by little under the attempts of many users, so some people remember the bridge of Skynet in science fiction movies, clamoring that "artificial intelligence derives personality".

Microsoft had to limit the number of replies to Bing Chat based on feedback, and the "castrated" version of Bing Chat became harmless and not so good.

At the same time, the technical dividends obtained by Microsoft some time ago have also been consumed little by little.

▲ Microsoft's stock price has fallen back to the pre-launch level of Bing Chat

In this way, if Google does not want Bard to repeat the mistakes of the past, it is understandable to let Bard cut off the search scene.

Jack Krawczyk also stressed at the plenary session that "we will continue to focus on Bard's testing work."

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said they would reveal more about Bard at this year's I/O conference, a "delaying tactic" that is shameful but useful. At least until Bard officially met the public, people saw the only mistakes he had made, and that was the only answer about the photos of exoplanets.

While putting out the fire, increase the horsepower

Although Google is now burned by artificial intelligence, they still firmly believe that this technology can benefit mankind, the so-called "AI abuses me thousands of times, I treat AI like my first love".

Just this week, Google and the Technical University of Berlin jointly announced the latest visual language model, PaLM-E, with 562 billion parameters.

In the demonstration, people give commands directly in language, and the robot can respond to them.

For example, to order the robot to go to the kitchen to get a package of rice chips (Rice chips), it needs to plan a task sequence that includes "to the kitchen", "find", "a package of rice chips", "return to the person who gave the instruction", "put down the rice chips", which is the application of language models in the field of robotics, engineers do not need to train the robot in language, the latter can also effortlessly understand the user's instructions, and make corresponding behaviors.

Such an application scenario instead allows Google to return to its original field of expertise, instead of messing with itself and using Bard to face ChatGPT, it is better to bypass the minefield and do what a technology giant is good at: integrating unlimited resources at hand to create new things that do not exist in this world.

Artificial intelligence has helped Google create the strongest single-camera Pixel phone in history, and also helped Waymo to sit on the top spot on the autonomous driving track, Google is not a new player in the field of artificial intelligence, and has never given up artificial intelligence.

Pixel 3, image source: 9to5 Google

Perhaps looking back at Bard further in the future is just a small episode in Google's evolutionary path.

Whether Google is going to the trough or returning to the top, the I/O development conference on May 10 this year will be a key node.

A good show has just begun. But what is certain is that the snipe mussels compete, and the user will always be the beneficiary.