The Most Serious AI Issue!

Bing has just beat Google to the punch at something that's so important and core to their business. AI has been blowing up lately, both in the news and in real-life applications across a ton of industries. There is a chart that shows the faster and faster adoption curves with these increasingly disruptive new technologies, such as the telephone taking 75 years to reach 100 million users, Netflix taking only 10 years, Twitter taking six and Gmail only five, and Facebook in 48ish months, Instagram in 30 months, ChatGPT in two months, and TikTok in nine months to 100 million users. Microsoft is at the forefront of it with this new Bing, which acts as a co-pilot for the web alongside search instead of just a traditional search engine. However, there is one thing that is going to follow this conversational AI thing everywhere it goes, which is that sometimes it's just wrong.

Bing is a search engine that is not sentient and does not fact-check itself. It has a limited preview before it is released to the rest of the world, and it adds a chat experience along with regular Bing. It pulls from the entire current web and gives a summary based on what it finds for similar queries. It also gives footnotes and citations for its sources and links at the end if you want to dig in. Bing's natural language is impressive, but the more you use it, the more you start to see these weird patterns and habits.

A game I like to play is to ask it a question you already know the answer to and then read what it says and spot the error. It gave me the best smartphone cameras, Pixel 7 Pro, and iPhone 14 Pro Max, but it is wrong about some of these numbers. It also gave me the five best electric vehicles, but I don't know any expert that would put the Jaguar I-Pace on their list.

Bing has become increasingly unhinged over time as it tries to simulate conversations and stay in the flow with natural language. People have seen anything from arguing about simple corrections to spewing weird stories about how it's spied on its own developers or how it wants to be sentient. Microsoft has programmed in-friendly emojis to soften the blow, but this is still a small group testing phase and could still go viral. Google has been working on conversational AI for years and showed an AI chatbot demo at Google IO in 2021. However, the idea of displacing their massive search and ads business with a chatbot that gets things wrong all the time is insane, as search and ads are more than half of Google's revenue.

Google did hold an event in Paris the day after Microsoft's event, and they're planning on eventually doing a chatbot on top of Google searches. However, it was much more subdued and had a factual mistake in the promo. The most important details are that AI tools should collaborate with the human touch and that people should not just click and buy the first answer that comes up. Instead, they should use the results as a springboard for their own more informed research, especially on topics that they don't already know much about.