Tag: bard

ChatGPT App Could Soon Be Set as the Default Assistant on Android Phones: Report

The rise of generative AI applications like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Copilot have made existing standard AI voice assistants like Siri and Google Assistant feel obsolete. Where advanced chatbots can hold human-like conversations, respond to queries on multiple topics, and can now even pull real-time information from the Internet, AI assistants on phones can do limited tasks. The ChatGPT app on both iOS and Android goes a long way in substituting the default assistant on the device. But now, OpenAI’s wildly successful chatbot, could likely properly replace Google Assistant on Android smartphones.

A report by Android Authority says that a code within the latest version of the ChatGPT Android app suggests that it could be set as the default assistant on an Android device..

According to the report, ChatGPT version 1.2023.352, which released last month, included a new activity named ‘com.openai.voice.assistant.AssistantActivity.’ The activity remains disabled by default, but can be manually enabled and launched. Once launched, it shows up on the device screen as an overlay with the same animation as ChatGPT app’s voice chat mode, the report claims. “This overlay appears over other apps and doesn’t take up the entire screen like the in-app voice chat mode. So, presumably, you could talk to ChatGPT from any screen by invoking this assistant,” it adds.

It’s clear, however, that assistant mode is a work in progress. The animation that plays when launching the activity reportedly doesn’t finish and the activity shuts down before you can interact with the chatbot. The report also says that the code required for the ChatGPT app to work as a “default digital assistant app” exists only partially. The ChatGPT app also seems to be missing necessary declarations and metadata tags that would allow it to be set as the default assistant on a device.

The AI assistant wars on mobile phones are about to kick off, with Google Assistant and Siri scrambling to catch up to modern chatbots. The ChatGPT app rolled out its voice chat feature for all free users on Android and iOS in November, effectively allowing the app to act as a voice assistant. Bear in mind, however, that free ChatGPT users cannot access real-time information from the Web on the app, so you can’t ask the chatbot about the latest sports scores or the weather forecast in your city, for example. You can, however, do that on the GPT-4 powered Bing app or the new standalone Copilot app from Microsoft, which launched on both Android and iOS last week.

While Android users don’t yet have a way to bring up the ChatGPT app easily with a gesture, like they would bring up the Google Assistant, iPhone 15 Pro users can simply bind the app with the dedicated Action Button, to bring it up and start conversing with the press of a single button. Google, meanwhile, is hard at work to bring Bard, its own generative AI chatbot, to Google Assistant. The company also recently announced Gemini, its most powerful AI model to date that would compete with OpenAI’s GPT-4 model.

Apple, on the other hand, seems to the one lagging behind in the AI assistant race. The iPhone maker is reportedly working on an AI-infused iOS 18 that will likely power its next lineup of smartphones. The default voice assistant on the upcoming iPhone 16 is said to get a major AI update, with the Siri team reportedly rejigged in Q3 2023 to work on including large language models (LLMs) and artificial intelligence-generated content (AIGC).

Will the Nothing Phone 2 serve as the successor to the Phone 1, or will the two co-exist? We discuss the company’s recently launched handset and more on the latest episode of Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
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Google Expands Bard AI Chatbot Access to Teenagers With Focus on Learning Tools

Google released its Bard AI chatbot to public in March, seeking to catch up to OpenAI’s wildly popular rival, ChatGPT. Initially available only via a waitlist in the US and the UK, the generative AI-backed chatbot was later rolled out in 180 countries and territories, including India, at Google’s annual I/O conference in Mountain View, California, in May. Since then, Bard has continued to grow, adding new features and language support in different regions. Now, Google is expanding access to Bard by bringing the chatbot to teenagers.

In its blog post on Wednesday, the search engine giant said it was opening up access to Bard to teenagers in most countries around the world. “Teens in those countries who meet the minimum age requirement to manage their own Google Account will be able to access Bard in English, with more languages to come over time,” Tulsee Doshi, Head of Product for Responsible AI, said in the post.

Google is positing Bard as a helpful learning tool for younger users, who it says can use that chatbot to aid in schoolwork, university applications, and picking up new hobbies and activities. Bard could also help students come up with ideas for science projects or learn more about specific time periods in history, the company said.

In a push for interactive learning, Bard will now include a math learning experience, wherein users can simply type in or upload a picture of a math equation, and Bard will generate a step-by-step explanation of how to solve the problem. Aside from math problems, the AI chatbot will also bring data visualisation tools, helping students generate charts and tables. Both these features are now live, initially available only in English.

Bard can now solve match equations
Photo Credit: Google

Over the past year, as artificial intelligence entrenched its presence by integrating with apps and devices people use, the emerging technology has also sparked scrutiny over its harmful effects. As Google opens up its chatbot to younger users it says the focus remains on responsible AI use. The company said it consulted with child safety and development experts for the Bard experience to remain safe for teens.

Teenagers themselves directly shared feedback over how to use generative AI with Google. The company has also developed an onboarding experience for teens in Bard that includes its AI Literacy Guide and a new video with tips on how to use generative AI responsibly. Additionally, Google has trained its chatbot to identify content and subjects that could be inappropriate for teens, while also putting safeguards in place prevent unsafe content to show up in Bard responses.

Bard recently received a suit of new features as Google scrambles to catch up to rival chatbot ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat. These include the ability to fact-check its answers and analyse users’ personal Google data, creating more synergy between Bard and other Google products.

Bard Extensions enables users to import their data from other Google apps like Google Drive or Gmail. The company is also working with external partners to connect their applications into Bard in the future, Google senior product director Jack Krawczyk said back in September. Bard is also susceptible to “hallucinations,” or inaccurate answers to user queries. With the new update, the chatbot admits when it’s not sure about its responses.

While Bard continues to expand access, it still has a long way to go in its popularity race with ChatGPT. In August, Google’s chatbot recorded 183 million visits, 13 percent of what ChatGPT received, according to website analytics firm Similarweb. OpenAI’s tool, meanwhile, continues to lead the AI chatbot charge with 100 million weekly users.

Google I/O 2023 saw the search giant repeatedly tell us that it cares about AI, alongside the launch of its first foldable phone and Pixel-branded tablet. This year, the company is going to supercharge its apps, services, and Android operating system with AI technology. We discuss this and more on Orbital, the Gadgets 360 podcast. Orbital is available on Spotify, Gaana, JioSaavn, Google Podcasts, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music and wherever you get your podcasts.
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YouTube Announces AI-Enabled Editing Products for Video Creators

YouTube will roll out a slew of artificial-intelligence-powered features for creators, the latest effort from parent company Alphabet to incorporate generative AI — technology that can create and synthesize text, images, music and other media given simple prompts — into its most important products and services.

Among the new products YouTube announced Thursday is a tool called Dream Screen that uses generative AI to add video or image backgrounds to short-form videos, which the company calls Shorts. It also announced new AI-enabled production tools to help with editing both short- and long-form videos on its platform.

“We’re unveiling a suite of products and features that will enable people to push the bounds of creative expression,” Toni Reid, YouTube’s vice president for community products, said in a blog post timed to the announcement Thursday. The Google-owned video platform first announced that it was developing the tools in March.

Google has been under pressure to show results and practical applications for its generative AI products. Some critics have been wary the company, which has long been seen as a leader in artificial intelligence, was falling behind upstarts like OpenAI or rival Microsoft, and that the products Google was rolling out weren’t yet ready for public consumption. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and a new Bing chatbot from Microsoft — which has invested $13 billion (nearly Rs. 1,08,100 crore) in OpenAI since 2019 — have been wildly popular and gained mainstream favour. 

Over the past few months, Google launched its own ChatGPT competitor, Bard, and released a steady flow of updates to the product. It’s  also incorporated experimental generative AI features into its most important services, including its flagship search engine, in what the company calls its experimental “search generative experience.” The product generates detailed summaries based on information it’s ingested from the internet and other digital sources in response to search queries.

The announcement of the new features also comes as YouTube is locked in fierce competition with ByteDance‘s TikTok and Meta Platforms‘s Instagram Reels to gain more share of the vertical, short-form video market. YouTube said it now sees more than 70 billion daily views on Shorts, and the new generative AI tools appear to be aimed at attracting even more users and creators and gaining a competitive edge over its rivals.

The company also announced YouTube Create, a mobile app aimed at helping the platform’s creators make video production work easier. The app includes AI-enabled features like editing and trimming, automatic captioning, voiceover capabilities and access to a library of filters and royalty-free music. The app is currently in beta on Android in “select markets,” the company said, and will be free of charge.

Beyond creation, YouTube said it would also provide creators with more tools to get AI-powered insights, help with automatic dubbing of videos and assist with finding music and soundtracks for videos.

© 2023 Bloomberg LP 

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News Organisations Call for Regulations on Content Use by AI Makers, Reveals Letter

A group of the world’s biggest news media organizations called for revised regulations on the use of copyrighted material by makers of artificial intelligence technology, according to an open letter published on Wednesday.

The note, signed by industry bodies like the News Media Alliance — which includes nearly 2,000 publications in the United States — and the European Publishers’ Council, batted for a framework enabling media companies to “collectively negotiate” with AI model operators regarding the operators’ use of their intellectual property.

“Generative AI and large language models… disseminate that content and information to their users, often without any consideration of, remuneration to, or attribution to the original creators. Such practices undermine the media industry’s core business models,” according to the letter. 

Services like OpenAI‘s ChatGPT and Google‘s Bard, which use the language producing generative AI, has led to a surge in online content produced by bots and several industries are assessing its impact on their businesses.

Most of those services do not disclose what inputs they have used to train their models, although with earlier versions of their models have said they used datasets comprising billions of pieces of information scraped from the internet for training, which include content from news websites.

Even as the technology sees wide adoption — several companies have launched features based on generative AI — governments around the world are still deliberating rules to govern its use.

The move echoes the news media industry’ long-standing effort to secure favorable deals with tech companies like Meta Platforms and Alphabet, which are often accused by publishers of running platforms filled with news content without adequately sharing profits. US lawmakers this year are considering a bill called the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act, which allow news broadcasters and publishers with fewer than 1,500 full-time workers to jointly negotiate ad rates with the likes of Google and Facebook.

Meanwhile, news companies are beginning to experiment with generative AI and negotiate deals with tech companies for their content to be used to train AI models.

News agency Associated Press, one of the signatories of the letter, last month signed a deal with OpenAI to license a part of AP’s archive of stories and explore generative AI’s use in news. OpenAI also committed $5 million (nearly Rs. 41 crores) to the American Journalism Project (AJP) under a partnership that will look for ways to support local news through AI.

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Meta to Release Open Source AI Model, Llama, to Compete Against OpenAI, Google’s Bard

Meta is releasing a commercial version of its open-source artificial intelligence model Llama, the company said on Tuesday, giving start-ups and other businesses a powerful free-of-charge alternative to pricey proprietary models sold by OpenAI and Google.

The new version of the model, called Llama 2, will be distributed by Microsoft through its Azure cloud service and will run on the Windows operating system, Meta said in a blog post, referring to Microsoft as “our preferred partner” for the release.

The model, which Meta previously provided only to select academics for research purposes, also will be made available via direct download and through Amazon Web Services, Hugging Face and other providers, according to the blog post and a separate Facebook post by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

“Open source drives innovation because it enables many more developers to build with new technology,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I believe it would unlock more progress if the ecosystem were more open.”

Making a model as sophisticated as Llama widely available and free for businesses to build atop threatens to upend the early dominance established in the nascent market for generative AI software by players like OpenAI, which Microsoft backs and whose models it already offers to business customers via Azure.

The first Llama was already competitive with models that power OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard chatbot, while the new Llama has been trained on 40 percent more data than its predecessor, with more than 1 million annotations by humans to fine-tune the quality of its outputs, Zuckerberg said.

“Commercial Llama could change the picture,” said Amjad Masad, chief executive at software developer platform Replit, who said more than 80 percent of projects there use OpenAI’s models.

“Any incremental improvement in open-source models is eating into the market share of closed-source models because you can run them cheaply and have less dependency,” said Masad.

The announcement follows plans by Microsoft’s largest cloud rivals, Alphabet’s Google and Amazon, to give business customers a range of AI models from which to choose.

Amazon, for instance, is marketing access to Claude – AI from the high-profile startup Anthropic – in addition to its own family of Titan models. Google, likewise, has said it plans to make Claude and other models available to its cloud customers.

Until now, Microsoft has focused on making technology available from OpenAI in Azure.

Asked why Microsoft would support an offering that might degrade OpenAI’s value, a Microsoft spokesperson said giving developers choice in the types of models they use would help extend its position as the go-to cloud platform for AI work.

Internal memo

For Meta, a flourishing open-source ecosystem of AI tech built using its models could stymie rivals’ plans to earn revenue off their proprietary technology, the value of which would evaporate if developers could use equally powerful open-source systems for free.

A leaked internal Google memo titled “We have no moat, and neither does OpenAI” lit up the tech world in May after it forecast just such a scenario.

Meta is also betting that it will benefit from the advancements, bug fixes and products that may grow out of its model becoming the go-to default for AI innovation, as it has over the past several years with its widely-adopted open source AI framework PyTorch.

As a social media company, Zuckerberg told investors in April, Meta has more to gain by effectively crowd-sourcing ways to reduce infrastructure costs and maximize creation of new consumer-facing tools that might draw people to its ad-supported services than it does by charging for access to its models.

“Unlike some of the other companies in the space, we’re not selling a cloud computing service where we try to keep the different software infrastructure that we’re building proprietary,” Zuckerberg said.

“For us, it’s way better if the industry standardizes on the basic tools that we’re using and therefore we can benefit from the improvements that others make.”

Releasing Llama into the wild also comes with risks, however, as it supercharges the ease with which unscrupulous actors may build products with little regard for safety controls.

In April, Stanford researchers took down a chatbot they had built for $600 using a version of the first Llama model after it generated unsavory text.

Meta executives say they believe public releases of technologies actually reduce safety risks by harnessing the wisdom of the crowd to identify problems and build resilience into the systems.

The company also says it has put in place an “acceptable use” policy for commercial Llama that prohibits “certain use cases,” including violence, terrorism, child exploitation and other criminal activities.

© Thomson Reuters 2023

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(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)

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Google Rolls Out Its AI Chatbot, Bard, in Europe and Brazil to Take on Microsoft-Backed ChatGPT

Alphabet said it is rolling out its artificial- intelligence chatbot, Bard, in Europe and Brazil on Thursday, the product’s biggest expansion since its February launch and pitting it against Microsoft-backed rival ChatGPT.

Bard and ChatGPT are human-sounding programs that use generative artificial intelligence to hold conversations with users and answer myriad prompts. The products have touched off global excitement tempered with caution.

Companies have jumped onto the AI bandwagon, investing billions with the hope of generating much more in advertising and cloud revenue. Earlier this week, billionaire Elon Musk also launched his long-teased artificial-intelligence startup xAI, whose team includes several former engineers at Google, Microsoft and OpenAI.

Google has also now added new features to Bard, which apply worldwide.

“Starting today, you can collaborate with Bard in over 40 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, German, Hindi and Spanish,” Google senior product director Jack Krawczyk said in a blog post.

“Sometimes hearing something out loud can help you approach your idea in a different way … This is especially helpful if you want to hear the correct pronunciation of a word or listen to a poem or script.”

He said users can now change the tone and style of Bard’s responses to either simple, long, short, professional or casual. They can pin or rename conversations, export code to more places and use images in prompts.

Bard’s launch in the EU had been held up by local privacy regulators. Krawczyk said Google had since then met the watchdogs to reassure them on issues relating to transparency, choice and control.

In a briefing with journalists, Amar Subramanya, engineering vice president of Bard, added that users could opt out of their data being collected.

Google has been hit by a fresh class action in the US over the alleged misuse of users’ personal information to train its artificial intelligence system.

Subramanya declined to comment on whether there were plans to develop a Bard app.

“Bard is an experiment,” he added. “We want to be bold and responsible.”

Nonetheless, novelty appeal may be waning, with recent Web user numbers showing that monthly traffic to ChatGPT’s website and unique visitors declined for the first time ever in June.

© Thomson Reuters 2023

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Google Said to Have Warned Employees Against Using Confidential Information on AI Chatbot

Alphabet is cautioning employees about how they use chatbots, including its own Bard, at the same time as it markets the program around the world, four people familiar with the matter told Reuters.

The Google parent has advised employees not to enter its confidential materials into AI chatbots, the people said and the company confirmed, citing long-standing policy on safeguarding information.

The chatbots, among them Bard and ChatGPT, are human-sounding programs that use so-called generative artificial intelligence to hold conversations with users and answer myriad prompts. Human reviewers may read the chats, and researchers found that similar AI could reproduce the data it absorbed during training, creating a leak risk.

Alphabet also alerted its engineers to avoid direct use of computer code that chatbots can generate, some of the people said. 

Asked for comment, the company said Bard can make undesired code suggestions, but it helps programmers nonetheless. Google also said it aimed to be transparent about the limitations of its technology.

The concerns show how Google wishes to avoid business harm from software it launched in competition with ChatGPT. At stake in Google’s race against ChatGPT’s backers OpenAI and Microsoft  are billions of dollars of investment and still untold advertising and cloud revenue from new AI programs.

Google’s caution also reflects what’s becoming a security standard for corporations, namely to warn personnel about using publicly-available chat programs.

A growing number of businesses around the world have set up guardrails on AI chatbots, among them Samsung, Amazon.com and Deutsche Bank, the companies told Reuters. Apple, which did not return requests for comment, reportedly has as well. 

Some 43 percent of professionals were using ChatGPT or other AI tools as of January, often without telling their bosses, according to a survey of nearly 12,000 respondents including from top US-based companies, done by the networking site Fishbowl.

By February, Google told staff testing Bard before its launch not to give it internal information, Insider reported. Now Google is rolling out Bard to more than 180 countries and in 40 languages as a springboard for creativity, and its warnings extend to its code suggestions.

Google told Reuters it has had detailed conversations with Ireland’s Data Protection Commission and is addressing regulators’ questions, after a Politico report Tuesday that the company was postponing Bard’s EU launch this week pending more information about the chatbot’s impact on privacy. 

Worries about sensitive information

Such technology can draft emails, documents, even software itself, promising to vastly speed up tasks. Included in this content, however, can be misinformation, sensitive data or even copyrighted passages from a Harry Potter novel.

A Google privacy notice updated on June 1 also states: “Don’t include confidential or sensitive information in your Bard conversations.”

Some companies have developed software to address such concerns. For instance, Cloudflare, which defends websites against cyberattacks and offers other cloud services, is marketing a capability for businesses to tag and restrict some data from flowing externally.

Google and Microsoft also are offering conversational tools to business customers that will come with a higher price tag but refrain from absorbing data into public AI models. The default setting in Bard and ChatGPT is to save users’ conversation history, which users can opt to delete. 

It “makes sense” that companies would not want their staff to use public chatbots for work, said Yusuf Mehdi, Microsoft’s consumer chief marketing officer.

“Companies are taking a duly conservative standpoint,” said Mehdi, explaining how Microsoft’s free Bing chatbot compares with its enterprise software. “There, our policies are much more strict.”

Microsoft declined to comment on whether it has a blanket ban on staff entering confidential information into public AI programs, including its own, though a different executive there told Reuters he personally restricted his use.

Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, said that typing confidential matters into chatbots was like “turning a bunch of PhD students loose in all of your private records.”

© Thomson Reuters 2023

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New Twitter CEO Appointment May Allow Elon Musk to Focus on Tesla, Remove Distraction

Elon Musk‘s selection of a new CEO for Twitter may remove a big distraction for the billionaire and allow him to focus more on Tesla, which has been struggling with a drop in demand for its electric vehicles, analysts said.

Shares of the world’s most valuable electric vehicle maker, which have gained 40 percent this year, rose about 2 percent in trading before the bell on Friday. The stock had its worst year in 2022, losing 65 percent, amid Musk’s on-again, off-again offer for Twitter.

Ever since Musk bought Twitter in a $44 billion (nearly Rs. 3,61,490 crore) deal, Tesla investors have been worried that he may not be able to give his full attention to the company, which is in a price war with upstarts and legacy automakers.

“This is a fractional positive for Tesla shareholders because he will likely spend a little bit more time on Tesla,” said Gene Munster, Managing Partner at Deepwater Asset Management. “However, there are other things that are competing for his time.”

Musk said on Thursday he had found a new CEO for Twitter, without naming the person. The Wall Street Journal reported that Comcast NBCUniversal executive Linda Yaccarino was in talks for the top role at the social media platform.

The billionaire said he would take on the role of chief technology officer at Twitter.

“Tesla investors are likely to celebrate this move too, with Musk’s very hands-on approach at Twitter leading to concerns he had taken his eye off the ball at this EV giant,” Hargreaves Lansdown analyst Sophie Lund-Yates said.

Although Twitter has taken much of Musk’s time since its takeover, he still actively manages several other businesses such as SpaceX and Neuralink. Musk recently formed an AI company called TruthGPT to take on OpenAI‘s ChatGPT and Alphabet‘s Bard.

Musk’s involvement with Twitter has been quite chaotic. He has slashed thousands of jobs at the social media company, fired its top executive team, including its CEO, and has made many changes to its policies and strategy to rely less on ads and more on subscription money.

© Thomson Reuters 2023
 

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Google Introduces Search Generative Experience to Rival Microsoft Bing’s AI

Alphabet‘s Google rolled out more artificial intelligence for its core search product, hoping to create some of the same consumer excitement generated by Microsoft‘s relaunch of rival search engine Bing in recent months.

At its annual I/O conference in Mountain View, California, on Wednesday, Google offered an updated version of its namesake engine. Called the Search Generative Experience, the new Google can craft responses to open-ended queries while retaining its recognizable list of links to the Web.

“We are reimagining all of our core products, including search,” Sundar Pichai, Alphabet’s CEO, said after he took the stage at the event.

He said Google is integrating generative AI into search and other products, including Gmail, where it can create draft messages, and Google Photos, where it can make major changes to images.

US consumers will gain access to the Search Generative Experience in the coming weeks via a wait list, a trial phase during which Google will monitor the quality, speed and cost of search results, Vice President Cathy Edwards said.

Google’s foray into what is known as generative AI comes after the startup OpenAI introduced ChatGPT, the darling chatbot of Silicon Valley that launched a furious funding race among would-be competitors. Generative AI can, using past data, create brand new content like fully formed text, images and software code.

OpenAI, backed by billions of dollars from Microsoft and now integrated into Bing search, has become for many the default version of generative AI, helping users spin up term papers, contracts, travel itineraries, even entire novels.

For years the top portal to the internet, Google has found its own perch in question since rivals began exploiting the technology as an alternative to presenting content from the Web. At stake is Google’s slice of the gigantic online advertising pie that the research firm MAGNA estimated at $286 billion (nearly Rs. 23,43,860 crore) this year.

In an interview, Edwards said Google’s aim was to employ generative AI to reduce steps for consumers to make decisions and to let people ask a broader set of queries, including creative ones. Addressing how AI can spout incorrect information, Edwards said the company prioritized accuracy and citing trusted sources.

“AI can provide insight,” Edward said. “But what fundamentally people want at the end of the day is to be connected to information from real people and organizations, knowing, for example, that this health information comes from the WHO,” or the World Health Organization.

What outfit to wear

With the embedded AI, Google still looks and acts like its familiar empty search bar.

Generally available will be a new filter called “Perspectives” spotlighting blogs, videos and content from social media, the company said. Google also will mark up images the company generates with AI and make it easier for consumers to vet a picture’s authenticity, it said.

But while a search for “weather San Francisco” will as usual point a user to an eight-day forecast, a query asking what outfit to wear in the California city prompts a lengthy response generated by AI, according to a demonstration for Reuters earlier this week.

“You should bring layers, including a short-sleeved shirt and a light sweater or jacket for the day,” the result stated, including links to websites where it gleaned such advice.

Searches for news or to navigate to a specific website did not result in a response by generative AI, though users can prompt a chat and press a button for a follow-up query, the demonstration showed.

Bing’s search, through its partnership with OpenAI, can summarize web pages, synthesize disparate sources, compose emails and translate them. Microsoft has said every percentage point of share it gains in search advertising could draw another $2 billion (nearly Rs. 16,385 crore) in revenue.

While Bing has commanded no more than one-tenth of the search market, according to estimates, Google has practically the rest of that to defend. This means any hit to the reliability of its search engine could carry a big consequence. Generative AI programs have been found to create false or misleading results absent grounding in reliable answers.

Another challenge is the high expense of drawing on such AI, known as large language models. Edwards said, “We and others are working on a variety of different ways to bring down the cost over time.”

Ads will remain a central part of the experience, Edwards said. “We only get paid when there’s a click.”

Bard for 180 countries

In recent years, Google’s rivals have taken its research breakthroughs and run with them in products, outpacing their inventor.

ChatGPT came to light after an AI system Google revealed in 2017. The speed at which the chatbot grew, however — faster than any consumer application in history — encouraged the often deliberative Google to prod staff to hurry along projects so they were ready for public consumption.

In February Google announced its competing chatbot called Bard. A promotional video that month that showed Bard answering a question incorrectly propelled a stock slide shaving $100 billion (nearly Rs. 8,19,340 crore) off Google’s market value.

Now, Google is launching Bard in 180 countries and territories, with plans to expand its support to 40 languages, the company said.

Behind Bard also is a more powerful AI model Google announced called PaLM 2, which it said could solve tougher problems and draft better computer code.

© Thomson Reuters 2023  
 

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YouTube Case at US Supreme Court Could Have Implications for ChatGPT and AI

When the US Supreme Court decides in the coming months whether to weaken a powerful shield protecting internet companies, the ruling also could have implications for rapidly developing technologies like artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT.

The justices are due to rule by the end of June whether Alphabet’s YouTube can be sued over its video recommendations to users. That case tests whether a US law that protects technology platforms from legal responsibility for content posted online by their users also applies when companies use algorithms to target users with recommendations.

What the court decides about those issues is relevant beyond social media platforms. Its ruling could influence the emerging debate over whether companies that develop generative AI chatbots like ChatGPT from OpenAI, a company in which Microsoft is a major investor, or Bard from Alphabet’s Google should be protected from legal claims like defamation or privacy violations, according to technology and legal experts.

That is because algorithms that power generative AI tools like ChatGPT and its successor GPT-4 operate in a somewhat similar way as those that suggest videos to YouTube users, the experts added.

“The debate is really about whether the organization of information available online through recommendation engines is so significant to shaping the content as to become liable,” said Cameron Kerry, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution think tank in Washington and an expert on AI. “You have the same kinds of issues with respect to a chatbot.”

Representatives for OpenAI and Google did not respond to requests for comment.

During arguments in February, Supreme Court justices expressed uncertainty over whether to weaken the protections enshrined in the law, known as Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. While the case does not directly relate to generative AI, Justice Neil Gorsuch noted that AI tools that generate “poetry” and “polemics” likely would not enjoy such legal protections.

The case is only one facet of an emerging conversation about whether Section 230 immunity should apply to AI models trained on troves of existing online data but capable of producing original works.

Section 230 protections generally apply to third-party content from users of a technology platform and not to information a company helped to develop. Courts have not yet weighed in on whether a response from an AI chatbot would be covered.

‘CONSEQUENCES OF THEIR OWN ACTIONS’

Democratic Senator Ron Wyden, who helped draft that law while in the House of Representatives, said the liability shield should not apply to generative AI tools because such tools “create content.”

“Section 230 is about protecting users and sites for hosting and organizing users’ speech. It should not protect companies from the consequences of their own actions and products,” Wyden said in a statement to Reuters.

The technology industry has pushed to preserve Section 230 despite bipartisan opposition to the immunity. They said tools like ChatGPT operate like search engines, directing users to existing content in response to a query.

“AI is not really creating anything. It’s taking existing content and putting it in a different fashion or different format,” said Carl Szabo, vice president and general counsel of NetChoice, a tech industry trade group.

Szabo said a weakened Section 230 would present an impossible task for AI developers, threatening to expose them to a flood of litigation that could stifle innovation.

Some experts forecast that courts may take a middle ground, examining the context in which the AI model generated a potentially harmful response.

In cases in which the AI model appears to paraphrase existing sources, the shield may still apply. But chatbots like ChatGPT have been known to create fictional responses that appear to have no connection to information found elsewhere online, a situation experts said would likely not be protected.

Hany Farid, a technologist and professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said that it stretches the imagination to argue that AI developers should be immune from lawsuits over models that they “programmed, trained and deployed.”

“When companies are held responsible in civil litigation for harms from the products they produce, they produce safer products,” Farid said. “And when they’re not held liable, they produce less safe products.”

The case being decided by the Supreme Court involves an appeal by the family of Nohemi Gonzalez, a 23-year-old college student from California who was fatally shot in a 2015 rampage by Islamist militants in Paris, of a lower court’s dismissal of her family’s lawsuit against YouTube.

The lawsuit accused Google of providing “material support” for terrorism and claimed that YouTube, through the video-sharing platform’s algorithms, unlawfully recommended videos by the Islamic State militant group, which claimed responsibility for the Paris attacks, to certain users. 

 

© Thomson Reuters 2023 

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