Google CEO Sundar Pichai participated in the latest week of the New York Times’ Hard Fork podcast, talking about developments in AI, the success of ChatGPT, and the open letter from researchers asking for pause in AI development.
Pichai presented himself as a moderate optimist regarding recent developments in AI systems and emphasized that Google acts boldly but also responsibly on products that incorporate AI.
Artificial Intelligence in Sundar Pichai’s Vision
Since taking over as CEO in 2015, Sundar Pichai has prioritized developing AI tools to improve Google products. However, the executive saw the OpenAI competitor, with investment from Microsoft, attract more interest in this segment with the launch of ChatGPT, at the end of last year.
On the Hard Fork podcast, Pichai said he was happy to see AI having a moment, even though Google wasn’t to blame. In March, the company launched Bard, an experimental conversational AI service, but it failed to catch the interest of its competitor.
“I feel like we took an improved Civic and put it in a race with more powerful cars,” Pichai said of the Bard’s tepid performance at launch. “But we’ll soon be upgrading Bard to some of our most capable PaLM language models, in both reasoning and coding.”
The CEO said he wasn’t surprised by ChatGPT’s success because he knew some of the company’s employees who had previously worked at Google. The surprise for him was how the product fit into the market and was widely and quickly adopted by users.
Regarding Google’s next steps in terms of artificial intelligence technologies, the CEO stated: “You will see that we are being bold and launching products, but we are going to be very responsible in the way we do it.”
A warning message about the dangers of artificial intelligence
Sundar Pichai also commented on the race to develop increasingly powerful artificial intelligence and the potential risks of this technology.
“I’ve been thinking about artificial intelligence for a long time, and we’re certainly working with technology that will be incredibly useful, but clearly has the potential to cause serious harm. So, I think it’s important that we all take responsibility,” the CEO stressed.
Despite the warning, Sundar Pichai does not entirely agree with all points of the open letter signed by nearly 2,000 researchers and technology leaders calling for a six-month pause in the development of AI systems.
“I think it’s important to listen to concerns. There are very thoughtful people who have been thinking about AI for a long time. I remember talking to Elon Musk eight years ago, and he was very concerned about the issue of AI security. And I think there’s merit in worrying about that. Whereas That I may not agree with all the details of the letter, I think disclosure is important,” he said.
source: New York times
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