Google, Microsoft in AI fever: Opportunity to strengthen the position of ‘search king’, if successful, it will be like ‘tiger growing more wings’ in Silicon Valley

After the launch of an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot called OpenAI’s ChatGPT and most recently Google’s Bard, users formed two streams of thought. The first is the feeling of “oh, technology can definitely change everything” and the second is the perception that people will have to put more trust in AI and the companies behind it.

When AI gives answers, not just information, users need to trust it deeply. The new generation of chat-based search engines is described as being able to respond like a real person, while providing links to relevant websites. However, for the above tool to be considered really useful, people have to trust it first.

The same is true for AI tools that help create text, spreadsheets, programming languages, images, or anything else. Both Microsoft and Google are committed to integrating AI into existing services, including Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. This technology is based on a new generation of creative AI, capable of creating verbal and visual content, not merely processing content. Having the trust of users means that the technology corporations standing behind are like “tiger growing more wings”.

Earlier, in a blog post about the impact of AI on advertisers, Rob Wilk, head of advertising at Microsoft, said that artificial intelligence can offer “smart opportunities” more and more feasible” for search engines.

“With personalized experiences, we hope to be able to deliver more relevant results to our users, with the ultimate goal of improving ROI for advertisers,” Wilk said in a post. on the blog.

Innovative AI will bring technology deeper into people’s lives and work. It not only answers questions but also helps us write speeches, compose poems and works of art. Developing and operating AI technology takes a lot of resources, so controlling them must be large and rich technology companies.

However, OpenAI, the company that develops the ChatGPT chatbot, seems to be the exception. This is only a relatively small company and has not been established for a long time (2015) but has been able to create a global fever with the new AI chatbot. However, this company quickly “falled into the arms” of Microsoft, in part because it needed the power of the corporation to operate the system.

According to the WSJ, trust in AI is the “treasure” that big tech companies try to protect. If users lose trust, their products will soon be boycotted.

A typical example is Galactica, a chatbot designed by Meta to serve scientific research, which can write newspapers, solve math problems and write code. However, like all other language models at the time, Galactica was just a bot that couldn’t distinguish fact from fiction. Within hours, scientists were sharing the misleading results and its inaccurate information on social networks.

“I have mixed feelings about this new endeavor. In the demo rollout, they look amazing, magical, and smart. However, people don’t seem to fully understand the principle, that such things can’t work the way we exaggerate,” said Chirag Shah at the University of Washington, who studies search technology. know.

As a result, instead of creating a big push as Meta expected, Galactica “died prematurely” after only 3 days of receiving intense criticism. Meta’s mistake once again shows Big Tech’s blind spot in the field of big language modeling. Numerous studies have pointed to the flaws of this technology, including its tendency to reproduce stereotypes and “say yes to no”.

Therefore, proving the reliability of AI will be able to create a competitive advantage for tech giants. This is also the bet of Google – the company has just committed to achieve the goal of developing “responsible AI”.

To see why trust is so important, you can visit You.com or Andisearch.com to check. If you ask You.com “Please list the best AI-based search engines”, it may give you a coherent and concise answer via chatbot, but subject to slight changes in wording, You.com will add very nonsensical stuff to the answer.

According to the WSJ, building reliable AI technology requires huge resources that only technology corporations the size of Microsoft and Google can meet. Tinglong Dai, a professor of operations management at Johns Hopkins University who studies human interaction and AI, says there are two reasons for this.

First, tens of thousands of computers in the cloud infrastructure are needed to train and operate the AI ​​system. Second, creative AI requires huge human resources to constantly test and adjust language models, so that they do not provide answers that are too meaningless or offensive.

Recently, Google has called on employees to test Bard, its new chatbot-based search engine. The details of Bard’s capabilities are unknown, but it seems that this chatbot can also talk and communicate similar to ChatGPT. A screenshot shows the user being able to ask Bard questions like how to give the kids a bath or what kind of food to eat for lunch.

“The bard will be a sign of creativity, a platform for the desire to know. It helps you explain to a 9-year-old the new discoveries of the James Webb Telescope and then hone their own skills,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai.

According to experts, a big tech company can fix problems that arise from AI – such as Bing’s misleading answers – by testing the system on a large scale.

Influencers in the advertising industry are seeing AI as a solution to increase the effectiveness of campaigns during an economic downturn. The agency also hopes that the development of technology can help them eliminate some cumbersome processes that do not bring much value.

However, many experts believe that the breakthrough of AI can shake Google’s position as “search king”.

“The biggest question is whether Google will continue to lead the search engine when making AI the new focus of development. For the first time in 15 years, Google faces a real challenge. This is also the first time they have been one step behind the overall pace of the market,” said Matt Naeger, director of strategy and marketing at Merkle.

There is also an opinion that the rush to notify users about a product that has not been released as widely as Bard is a sign of an emergency at a “red alert” level at Google. Obviously the company has no concrete plans to launch Bard in the near future, but the emergence and widespread popularity of ChatGPT has forced Google to change its approach.

“Silicon Valley giants like Google and Meta are concerned about the growth of ChatGPT. 80% of Alphabet’s revenue in 2021 will come from Google ads, and as ChatGPT’s popularity grows exponentially, it could hurt profits,” Manish Sinha, CMO of fiber-optic maker STL, said. know.

However, with the current position, the possibility of Google being defeated is said to be relatively small. Moreover, if successful with Bard, this giant will have more and more competitive power in the AI ​​race.

It is known that Microsoft and OpenAI have committed to complying with AI guidelines against issues such as “fake news, data safety, and preventing the promotion of harmful or racist content”. Google also maintains similar commitments and published its own set of AI principles in 2018.

“I predict AI will evolve and one day become a force to be reckoned with. Brands don’t need to be too cautious with the explosive growth of AI in search engines, but let’s be realistic with expectations because it’s still quite limited at the moment,” said James Brooks, Director. CEO and founder of GlassView, said.

The proof is that there is still much controversy surrounding ChatGPT, how long it will take for this technology to work without any human intervention. Open AI CEO Sam Altman himself acknowledges the technology’s limitations.

“ChatGPT still has many shortcomings but makes people think it is perfect. We should not depend on this chatbot for important matters,” he shared. Therefore, teachers believe that students should not abuse ChatGPT but should pay attention to the source of information and cite documents in scientific texts.

By: WSJ, Bloomberg