As technology advances, industry experts believe, Google must decide whether to overhaul its search engine and make a full-fledged chatbot the face of its flagship service.
Google was hesitant to share its technology widely because, like ChatGPT and similar systems, it can generate false, toxic, and biased information. LaMDA is only available to a limited number of people through an experimental app, AI Test Kitchen.
Google sees this as a battle to deploy its advanced AI without harming users or society, according to a memo viewed by The Times. At a recent meeting, an executive acknowledged that smaller companies are less concerned about releasing these tools, but said Google needs to wade into the fray or the industry can go on without it, according to an audio recording of the meeting provided by The Times has been obtained.
Other companies have a similar problem. Five years ago, Microsoft released a chatbot called Tay that spewed racist, xenophobic, and otherwise filthy language and was forced to immediately remove it from the Internet — never to return. In recent weeks, Meta has disabled a newer chatbot for many of the same reasons.
Executives said in the taped meeting that Google planned to release the technology that powered the chatbot as a cloud computing service for third-party companies, and that it could incorporate the technology into simple customer support tasks. It will maintain its trust and safety standards for official products, but it will also release prototypes that do not meet those standards.
It could limit those prototypes to 500,000 users and warn them that the technology could make false or offensive statements. Since its release on the last day of November, ChatGPT – which can produce similarly toxic material – has been used by more than a million people.
“A cool demo of a conversation system that lets people interact in a few rounds, and it feels amazing? That’s a good step, but it’s not the thing that will really change society,” Zoubin Ghahramani, who oversees the Google Brain AI lab, said in an interview with The Times last month, before ChatGPT was released. “It’s not something people can reliably use on a daily basis.”
