Generative artificial intelligence has been added to search
Towards an Efficient Automated Dialect System: Chatbots for the Generative AI Revolution and Google‘s Search Labs
As the company moves the technology into more of its products, perhaps the generative AI revolution will turn out to be a lot less fun than you might expect from the early shock and awe of ChatGPT, a chatbot that has an edgy charm. Gone are the wild ravings and imaginings of powerful AI bots. New ways to populate spreadsheets, compose pleasantries, and find products to buy are in their place.
A query about the event of Britain’s new king might be summarized by a couple of paragraphs. If asked about e bikes, it is possible for a user to click on the product reviews on various websites and make a purchase. The revamped version of search will be accessible in the US via a new feature called Search Labs, but it will not be activated by default or for all Google users.
Thevice president of search at Google told WIRED that new features would be included at I/O, but that they would make mistakes.
ChatGPT is powered by a machine learning model trained to predict the words likely to follow a string of text by digesting huge amounts of text, including vast numbers of web pages. Additional training, provided by humans rating the quality of the bot’s responses, made ChatGPT more adept at answering questions and holding a conversation.
Google’s smarter version of search resists using the first person or talking about feelings or thoughts. It does not offer answers to potentially controversial topics such as US politics or refuse to give medical advice.
It will be interesting to see how companies like Open AI balance the creation of more powerful generative language models with the need for them to behave, even if the warnings about bad artificial intelligence are overblown.
In March, some big names in AI research signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on creating machine learning systems more powerful than GPT-4, which powers ChatGPT. Pichai was not a signatory and said in his keynote speech yesterday that the company is currently training a new, more powerful language model called Gemini.
The source told me that the new system will incorporate a number of recent advances from different large language models. But don’t expect to get to experience the full power or charisma Gemini can offer. It may seem like another clever autocomplete if the same chaos-taming methods seen in the chat-like search experiment are applied.
