The success of the acclaimed text writing bot ChatGPT’s artificial intelligence (AI) platform set off alarm bells at the Mountain View offices and led to Googleaccording to The New York Times, to work on the development of more than 20 AI-powered projects.
Among these plans, according to the report of The Verge quoting the Times report, is “demonstrate a version of their search engine with chatbot functions this year”.
Interestingly, US media reports reported in December that Google executives were concerned that, despite investing heavily in artificial intelligence technology, moving too quickly to implement it could damage the company’s reputation. But things are changing.
Google recently laid off more than 12,000 employees and will focus on AI as “a domain of primary importance”.
When will Google show its projects?
It’s unknown when the company will demo, but other projects appear to be confirmed in slides seen by the Times. will debut during their annual I/O event in May.
The situation is dire enough that the Times has also reported that Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who remain majority shareholders in parent company Alphabet, “offered advice” to company leaders, approved plans and pitched ideas while meeting with executives to discuss ChatGPT in December.
In the search for its chatbot, Google will prioritize “getting data right, ensuring security and getting rid of misinformation”, hoping to address the issue of AI confidently and clearly responding to queries with incorrect information.
Meanwhile, at the big G it’s also working on ways to speed up the review processes that are supposed to check technology to see if it’s working fairly and ethically.
Other projects
Projects also include an imaging studio that “creates and edits images” and an application for testing product prototypes and a set of tools that other companies can use to create AI prototypes from a browser window called MakerSuite.
Google is also working on a code generation tool called PaLM-Coder 2 which is similar to Microsoft’s GitHub Copilot software and another which helps create smartphone apps called Colab + Android Studio.
It looks like they are moving fast.