Google's Missed Opportunity: Playing Catchup with AI Chatbot Technology
谷歌 , one of the world's leading tech giants, has been playing catchup with its latest artificial intelligence (AI) creation called Bard. The company unveiled the technology last month, and it's being tested before being made available more widely. Bard, like ChatGPT AI , answers queries in a conversational way, but Google fears that if the AI format proves popular for search, 微软 could nab a significant chunk of the lucrative advertising market from Google’s own popular search product.
According to a Wall Street journal website report, Google missed a golden opportunity to lead the way with its own ChatGPT-like chatbot technology tool two years ago. The two Google researchers who created the powerful conversational AI technology, Daniel De Freitas and Noam Shazeer, reportedly told colleagues at the time that their creation could revolutionize how people searched on the internet and worked with computers. They wanted Google to make a public demo available and to incorporate it into the Google Assistant virtual helper, but executives were unconvinced, claiming the technology fell short of company standards regarding the “safety and fairness” of AI systems.
The missed opportunity allowed Microsoft to take the lead when it backed ChatGPT-creator OpenAI , released a public beta, and incorporated elements of it into its Bing search engine. Microsoft enjoyed all of the resulting publicity associated with its bold decision to make the AI tool widely available, while Google's overly cautious attitude prevented it from releasing its own version.
Despite the setback, Google and its parent company Alphabet have enormous resources to ensure Bard’s rapid development, giving it a fighting chance of effectively competing with anything that Microsoft produces. However, De Freitas and Shazeer left the company in 2021, apparently discouraged by Google's reluctance to take a chance with their work.
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The use of conversational AI technology goes way beyond search engines, and there is significant potential for its application in various industries. Companies that can develop the technology to its full potential stand to reap significant benefits in the coming years. Google's Bard has a lot of catching up to do, but the company's vast resources and expertise could see it emerge as a market leader in the near future. Only time will tell if the missed opportunity to take the lead with ChatGPT was a minor blip or a significant setback for Google's AI aspirations.