In 1961, American novelist Joseph Heller wrote his most famous novel, Catch-22, which describes the bureaucratic restrictions imposed on soldiers during World War II.
After the novel was published, the term "catch-22" was used to describe complex situations, or dilemmas, in which a person falls into a vicious circle of rules or circumstances surrounding him, without being able to find a way out.
At that time, regardless of your decision, the result will be bad in any case, and perhaps this is what Google has suffered from during the last period.
Last Wednesday, February 8, Google, or to be precise, the parent company, Alphabet, lost $100 billion of its market value, after the company's share price fell in stock trading that day.
This loss came after Google announced its new BARD chatbot, which seems to have made a very costly mistake.
A mistake worth 100 billion dollars!
On that day, the company "Alphabet" had shared, in a live broadcast from Paris, the capabilities of the new chatbot "Bard" and how it would integrate it with its search engine (1), one day after Microsoft announced the integration of the famous chatbot, which is exciting to many Most recently, ChatGPT has been featured in its search engine, Bing.
Bard is an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA.
Built using our large language models and drawing on information from the web, it's a launchpad for curiosity and can help simplify complex topics → https://t.co/fSp531xKy3 pic.twitter.com/JecHXVmt8l
— Google (@Google) February 6, 2023
During the demonstration of the capabilities of the robot "Bard", a question appeared from the user to the robot: "What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year-old?" The James Webb Telescope took the first image of a planet outside our solar system.
But the problem, according to NASA, is that the first image of a planet outside our solar system was taken by the Very Large Telescope of the European Southern Observatory nearly two decades ago, specifically in 2004. (2)
After Reuters announced the discovery of this error, investors began to fear that Google was not in control of the situation, especially since it did not impress anyone with its offer, and here the process of selling the stock began, and thus the company's value decreased by about $ 100 billion within hours.
(3)
But the matter is not just about a mistake from a chatbot that relies on artificial intelligence. There are previous crises and upcoming battles in this field, and most importantly, Google began to feel an existential threat, which made it rush and fall into this vicious circle.
Simply put, Google fell into the "catch-22" dilemma. Waiting more than this means Microsoft's victory in the battle, and rushing to announce the matter means risking errors that cost billions of dollars. Two choices are both difficult, and the company chose the second option, and lost the bet on what It seems.
hallucination of a robot
Google's bot error led to a $100 billion drop in the company's value.
(Shutterstock)
Let's talk now about the technology that raised this problem, which is the "Bard" chatbot that relies on a large language model known as "LaMDA" (LaMDA), and its goal is simply to compete with the bot that has raised everyone's eyebrows lately "ChatGPT" ( ChatGPT), developed by OpenAI.
These large language models are artificial intelligence systems that have been trained to recognize patterns in a huge number of online texts, such as books, conversations, articles, etc., and then train more with human help to provide better conversation and answers to the user, simulating the experience of chatting with real people.
But although the answers you get may seem convincing and even reliable, they may be completely wrong answers, which is called "hallucination".
In artificial intelligence, artificial hallucinations occur when a robot gives you a confident answer but is not justified by the data it has trained on.
The problem with the hallucinations of robots is that the answer may seem convincing and correct on the surface, but it is wrong in reality, to the extent that Prabhakar Raghavan, who is responsible for the Google search engine, warned of the dangers of this matter in a press interview last Saturday, February 11, and that is why Google was not made available. The new chatbot is only for a group of trusted people to test, before it is made public and integrated into its search engine.
(4)
And it's not just about the Google bot, as an independent artificial intelligence researcher discovered that the first presentation of the search engine bot "Bing" was also riddled with errors in the calculation of financial statements, when it tried to summarize a quarterly report of a company's earnings.
(5) However, no one noticed these errors, as happened with Google, perhaps because the Google robot error was clearer, and that any normal search on the Google search engine will give you the correct answer.
Emergency
The sudden overwhelming popularity that GBT Chat has gained since its launch is what prompted Google's management to declare a "state of emergency".
(Shutterstock)
Of course, Google did not start working on developing the "Bold" robot suddenly, or when it felt threatened by the "GBT chat" robot and competition from Microsoft, but it was the announcement of the launch of the robot itself that came in a hurry, and perhaps the reason behind the costly error that appeared to everyone, So much so that employees criticized the company's leadership, especially CEO Sundar Pichai, for the way they dealt with the announcement of the new robot, and indicated that it was a "hasty", "failed" and "short-sighted" advertisement, and had nothing to do with Google's usual policy.
(6)
Last December, the New York Times reported on an internal meeting at Google, staff and management, and the employees' questions revolved around this: Has the company lost its competitive edge in artificial intelligence, given the sudden and overwhelming popularity of the GBT chatbot? Especially since it was Google that originally developed, in 2017, the model on which the "Open AI" robot relies, which is the "Transformer" model?
At that time, the response of Sandar Pichai and Jeff Dean, head of the artificial intelligence department, came that Google actually has similar capabilities and may exceed the capabilities of "GPT Chat", but the cost will be much greater in the event that something goes wrong, because the user simply must trust the answers that It will be obtained from the Google search engine.
(7)
But the sudden overwhelming popularity that GBT Chat has gained since its launch is what prompted Google's management to declare a "state of emergency", as the same New York Times report noted.
Perhaps for the first time since its founding, the company fears that a massive technological change is imminent that could disrupt its core business model, Internet search.
This prompted the company to seek the services of its founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, after they retired and left the company's daily operations, with whom I held several meetings to consult on how to deal with this real and unique threat to the company.
(8) Sundar Pichai had called on all Google employees to focus and pay attention to testing the new chatbot "Cool", after the company faced a lot of pressure, whether from employees within it or investors, to find a solution to confront the competing robot "Chat GBT".
(9)
The beginning of the artificial intelligence war
The GBT chatbot may have sparked a generative AI war, one that Google is not yet willing to enter.
(Shutterstock)
Unlike its biggest competitors, Apple and Microsoft, Google has never seen a real need to reinvent itself.
This is of course for several reasons, but the most obvious is its control of the global search engine market, by approximately 93%, while its strongest competitor, Microsoft, owns only 3%.
(10) This sweeping superiority made Google focus on this treasure without the need to move quickly in other areas, because the search engine market is guaranteed to it in any case.
(11)
The real threat here does not come from conversation models that rely on artificial intelligence, because Google has been working on developing them for some time already, as we knew, and would have presented them in the future and might have integrated them into the search engine, but the real threat is that another giant company, a competitor the size of Microsoft, decided to rush It is trying its luck by integrating ChatGBT technology into its search engine.
Microsoft already has the infrastructure, including massive computing power and cloud storage services, that OpenAI relies on to run GPT Chat.
Besides, she has nothing to lose anyway, even if her bot screws up.
On the contrary, this step may bring it gains and increase the share of “Bing” in the search engine market, even if the idea of a search based on a chatbot does not succeed completely, simply because it will bring more users, and this in turn means more ads in the current model of search engines. .
In addition, Microsoft does not want to lose another pivotal moment in its history, after missing the opportunity to break into the smartphone market in the past.
On the other hand, Google has very much to lose. First, the company does not know how it can earn from this bot yet, in addition to the risk of wrong answers, which actually happened even before the bot began to spread and be used in real life.
Microsoft presented a better strategy for launching the new product, along with its presentations, explanations, and the confidence of its CEO, Satya Nadella, in talking about artificial intelligence technologies that the company will soon introduce.
(Shutterstock)
It is certain that Google already has much stronger technical capabilities than its recent experience shows, and it is stronger than Microsoft, so that many of those who tested the "lambda" language model mentioned that it is much stronger than "GPT-3", along with the workforce owned by the company and the extent of its investment. In the search engine market, and in the areas of artificial intelligence research.But the strengths are the same that prevented it from moving quickly as Microsoft did in this battle.It is very difficult for the giant company to change its business model suddenly and now, after many years of control, and in general this change does not It comes between day and night in any other company, let alone a company the size of Google!
While Microsoft's move this time was more marketing than technical, it certainly wasn't surprising, because the company has invested in the "Open AI" organization since 2019, but it was waiting for the move to spread "GPT chat" to the general public, and most likely it did not expect this. The huge turnout in this short time, but she took advantage of the opportunity and invested it in her best possible way so far.
Microsoft presented a better strategy for launching the new product, along with its presentations, explanations, and the confidence of its CEO, Satya Nadella, in talking about artificial intelligence technologies that the company will soon introduce, even as he knows and acknowledges the existence of mistakes that the robot will make, but it does not scare him or his company, because in the end he wants To gain the first attack advantage in the war.
After all, the GPT chatbot may have sparked a generative AI war that Google wasn't willing to enter now, and put Microsoft one step ahead of the race, but that doesn't mean Google will throw up its cards and give up easily. And they will lose the war in the end.
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Sources:
(1) Reinventing search with a new AI-powered Bing and Edge
(2) 2M1207 b - First image of an exoplanet
(3) Alphabet shares dive after Google AI chatbot Bard flubs answer in ad
(4) Google cautions against 'hallucinating' chatbots
(5) Microsoft's Bing AI, like Google's, also made dumb mistakes during the first demo
(6) Google employees criticize CEO Sundar Pichai for 'rushed, botched' announcement of GPT competitor Bard
(7) A New Chat Bot Is a 'Code Red' for Google's Search Business
(8) Google Calls In Help From Larry Page and Sergey Brin for AI Fight
(9) Google CEO issues rallying cry in internal memo: All hands on deck to test ChatGPT competitor Bard
(10) Search Engine Market Share Worldwide
(11) Annual revenue of Google from 2002 to 2022