The internet went wild when OpenAI unveiled its GPT-based chatbot ChatGPT, prompting some to declare that Google’s dominance of the search market is over. Google, of course, has taken notice of ChatGPT and, as a New York Times investigation had earlier revealed, has already issued a “code red” over the developments. According to the most recent Bloomberg story, the business invested close to $400 million in Anthropic, which is now testing a substitute for OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Similar to the $1 billion that Microsoft put in OpenAI in 2019, this agreement follows one where Microsoft promised to investing almost $10 billion in the firm.
ChatGPT has gone viral since OpenAI released the text-based artificial intelligence chatbot tool in November.
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But specifically how does Google want to launch LaMDA, an AI chatbot that has been in limited beta testing for a long now? Let’s look at what is known so far regarding Google’s own AI strategy and why it might invest heavily in this in 2023.
Google’s investments in AI
Anthropic is not Google’s first significant investment in technologies related to artificial intelligence. Google’s parent firm, Alphabet, purchased the British AI research facility DeepMind in 2014. DeepMind is renowned for creating the AlphaGo software that defeated world champion Go player Lee Sedol in 2016 as well as the chess programmes AlphaZero and AlphaFold that accurately predicted the shapes of nearly all proteins known to science.
Other AI businesses that Google has purchased include Alter, Dark Blue Labs, Dialogflow, Granata Decision Systems, Phiar, AIMatter, and Boston Dynamics, according to Crunchbase.
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Some Google employees are reportedly wondering if they lost a chance given the company’s long history of boasting about its AI competence. Analysts are also speculating as to whether AI chatbots will one day challenge Google’s hegemony.
OpenAI, a research firm supported by Microsoft and others, created the technology. On the basis of written prompts, ChatGPT intelligently and automatically generates text. It is even capable of carrying on a discussion that is quite similar to one you would have with a real person.
Google’s ‘measured approach’ to AI
Google explained its “slower approach” to introducing new AI-based breakthroughs in a thorough blog post it published in January. Additionally, we think that achieving success in AI requires collaboration between us and other parties, such as researchers, developers, consumers, governments, regulators, and citizens. If AI is to fulfil its promise for people and society, it is imperative that we as a society gain the public’s trust. The statement stated, “As a firm, we embrace the opportunity to collaborate with others to get AI right.
James Manyika, an SVP at Google, Jeff Dean, the head of Google’s AI division, Demis Hassabis, the CEO and co-founder of Alphabet-owned DeepMind, Marian Croak, the vice president of engineering at Google, and Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and Alphabet, all signed it. In addition, the corporation was said to be “doing continual adversarial and similar forms of testing and has chosen a distinct and deliberate approach to access and deployment of emerging systems such as LaMDA, PaLM, and Waymo,” according to the report.
Google’s AI showcase
Google will demonstrate how it is “using the power of AI to reinvent how people search for, discover, and interact with information, making it more natural and intuitive than ever before to find what you need” at an event on February 8.
A ChatGPT-like chatbot called “Apprentice Bard” is also being developed by Google employees. Because Apprentice Bard is based on the company’s LaMDA technology, it should have some advantages over ChatGPT. According to CNBC, ChatGPT has little awareness of events that occurred after 2021, but Apprentice Bard incorporates replies from recent occurrences.
New Google AI products planned for 2023
According to the New York Times, Google now intends to introduce more than 20 new products and show off a chatbot-enabled search engine this year. At the company’s conference in May, reviewed prototypes for several of these products are anticipated to make their debut. This might contain an updated version of the experimental app AI Test Kitchen, which is used to test product prototypes, and Image Generation Studio, which generates and alters images.
A feature called Shopping Try-on, a YouTube green-screen function that enables video makers to build backgrounds, a wallpaper generator for the Pixel smartphone, and a tool that could summarise films by producing a new one are some of the additional projects the business is working on.
Many of these AI algorithms will likely be made available to software developers and other businesses, which might increase Google Cloud’s revenue.
LaMDA is used by Google’s Wordcraft project to create fiction from writing submissions. The business is also experimenting with leveraging AI to produce music and films. For instance, the company’s MusicLM can instantaneously produce music based on a text-based suggestion. It’s interesting to note that MusicLM can even read descriptions of photographs to produce music that blends nicely with the scene.
The most intriguing part of Google’s efforts to further integrate AI into its operations will be how it uses the same technology that powers ChatGPT and LaMDA to enhance its search engine. However, many industry analysts think that the corporation will continue to improve the search engine incrementally rather than completely redesign it.
