In a newspaper interview that was published on Saturday, the head of Google’s search engine cautioned against the dangers of artificial intelligence in chatbots as Google parent company Alphabet (GOOGL.O) fights to compete with popular app ChatGPT.
“This kind of artificial intelligence we’re talking about right now can sometimes lead to something we call hallucination,” Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president at Google and head of Google Search, told Germany’s Welt am Sonntag newspaper.
“This then expresses itself in such a way that a machine provides a convincing but completely made-up answer,” Raghavan said in comments published in German. One of the fundamental tasks, he added, was keeping this to a minimum.
Following the November launch of ChatGPT by OpenAI, a startup that Microsoft (MSFT.O) is investing about $10 billion in, Google has been put on the defensive. ChatGPT has impressed users with its remarkably human-like responses to user queries.
Alphabet Inc. unveiled Bard, a chatbot, earlier this week. However, the software communicated false information in a promotional video, resulting in a mistake that caused the company’s market worth to drop by $100 billion on Wednesday.
Alphabet has not yet stated a release date for Bard, which is still undergoing user testing.
“We obviously feel the urgency, but we also feel the great responsibility,” Raghavan said. “We certainly don’t want to mislead the public.”
