GoogleBard’s announcement last week was meant to show that the company has technology similar to its popular ChatGPT chatbot, though it still has a ways to go before it becomes product-ready, Alphabet Chairman John Hennessy said Monday.
“I think Google is hesitant to produce this because they don’t think it’s ready for a product, but, I think, as a demonstration vehicle, it’s a good technology,” said Hennessy, who has served as chairman. from parent company Google as of 2018. He went on to say that he thinks generative AI is still one to two years away from becoming a useful tool for the wider public.
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Hennessy spoke at a summit held by venture firm Celesta Capital in Mountain View, California, on Monday. Hennessy has a long history in technology, including as a professor, researcher and company founder, and also served as president of Stanford University from 2000 to 2016.
Hennessy, who spoke about the main trends in 2023, was quick to touch on Google who was caught up in the rush of interest in ChatGPT and generative AI.
Last week, the company launched its response to ChatGPT in a chat technology called Bard. But the announcement was seen as a rush to match Microsoft’s ChatGPT technology to the search engine, Bing, and investors condemned Alphabet’s shares, sending them down 9% for the day.
Hennessy said Google was slow to roll out its ChatGPT competitor because it was still giving the wrong answer. Google is one of the most widely used consumer products, and entities like YouTube and Search have sometimes provided inaccurate information in the past.
The past, it seems, inspires caution in the company.
“You don’t want to create a system that misbehaves or sometimes has toxic behavior,” Hennessy said during the conference, echoing CEO Sundar Pichai’s words in December when employees asked him what was behind ChatGPT. The tech industry needs to be “more careful about the conditions it creates in civil society,” he acknowledged.
“I think these models are still in their infancy,” Hennessey told CNBC Monday. the industry has struggled with that.”
He added, “I don’t think Vint anticipated that people would use the internet to do bad things,” referring to Google executive Vint Cerf, who was one of the early developers of the internet’s underlying technology.
“I came from an age where if you spam people, you are a social pariah. Now, I get ten spam messages for every real message, so the world has changed and we have to think about what role technology plays in. ensuring that we have a functioning democracy, we have people we can live with and work with, we don’t hate each other or some other toxic things.
Hennessy also said that he has been impressed with the capabilities of ChatGPT, and that it is moving faster than he anticipated.
“I was impressed by two things – first of all the quality of the ability of natural language to interpret questions but also to respond to something – the generative function. I was impressed that it was possible, at least at a fairly superficial level, to get many things right.
He declined to comment specifically on public reaction to Google’s Bard announcement last week.
Hennessy went on to say that it’s a good time for startups in Silicon Valley, which could benefit from getting talent from big tech during the current layoff cycle.
“Startups have an important role to play in the Valley,” he said. ”