By
Temitope Olatunji
April 2nd, 2024
The Alphabet Inc Chairman revealed that the company is treading carefully in addressing toxic responses or content from Bard.
John Hennessy, the Chairman of American multinational tech giant Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ: AAPL) has opened up about Bard, the generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) tool that was designed to rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Bard was launched last week but fell short of expectations as ChatGPT has set such a high standard that has kept everyone awed since its launch.
According to Hennessy, the company made the decision to launch Bard even though there was a lot of perfection needed. He justified this by saying the company needed to show it has the technology to match ChatGPT, an assertion it requires to prove it’s still a leader in the tech and AI space.
“I think Google was hesitant to productize this because it didn’t think it was really ready for a product yet, but, I think, as a demonstration vehicle, it’s a great piece of technology,” Hennessy said.
The advent of ChatGPT has changed the content generation space in a whole lot of ways. The program has recorded more than 100 million users within the first two months of its launch. This feat is a rare one and coupled with its generative capabilities, Hennessy said he is impressed with the tool.
While the launch of Bard was Google’s own attempt to join the competition, the preliminary drawbacks were costly for the firm. Upon the release, the company’s shares fell by more than 9% according to CNBC. At the time of writing, GOOGL is trading marginally up at a price of $94.66.
According to Hennessy, the integration of ChatGPT into Bing and Microsoft Edge also served as a major competitive shakeup that necessitated a due response. The veteran believes the AI technology powering its Bard and even ChatGPT still has about 2 years before it gets to the mainstream.
Alphabet Inc’s Caution for Bard
The Alphabet Inc Chairman revealed that the company is treading carefully in addressing toxic responses or content from Bard. He highlighted how the digital world has evolved over the years and how tools like ChatGPT and Bard can be a major difference.
“I think these models are still in the early days – figuring out how to bring them into a product stream and do it in a way that’s sensitive to correctness, as well as issues like toxicity,” Hennessey told CNBC on Monday. “I think the industry is struggling with that.”
Since the launch of ChatGPT, many political activists on Twitter have shown how the tool is politically partial in some contexts. As far as Hennessy is concerned, these nuances must be addressed in order to court a functioning democracy.
“…we’ve got to think about what role technology has in ensuring that we have a functioning democracy, we have people who can live together and work together, we don’t have hatred or some of these other toxic things. I think we really do need to work on that,” he said.