AI is one of the deepest platform shifts ever, says Google’s CEO, and he’s not worried about being first.
Sundar Pichai is the CEO of Google and Alphabet. We spoke the day after Google I/O, the company’s big developer conference, where Sundar introduced new generative AI features in virtually all of the company’s products.
It’s an important moment for Google, which invented a lot of the core technology behind the current AI moment. The company is very quick to point out that the “T” in ChatGPT stands for transformer, the large language model technology first invented at Google, but OpenAI and others have been first to market with generative AI products, and OpenAI has partnered with Microsoft on a new version of Bing that feels like the first real competitor to Google Search in a long time. I wanted to know what Sundar thinks of this moment and, in particular, what he thinks of the future of Search, which is the heart of Google’s business. — Read More
Daily Archives: May 15, 2023
ChatGPT vs. Bard: A realistic comparison
Let’s see how Bard does vs. ChatGPT, without preconceptions or hype. One person’s totally unscientific, anecdotal, but realistic field experiment.
… This is not a scientific study, clearly. Once upon a time, I enjoyed doing controlled, in-depth, technical comparisons of ML models, but those days are past. In this post, I’m going to take about an hour to explore a few use cases, make a decision, and move on to the rest of my long to-do list. — Read More
Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey?
As it’s currently imagined, the technology promises to concentrate wealth and disempower workers. Is an alternative possible?
When we talk about artificial intelligence, we rely on metaphor, as we always do when dealing with something new and unfamiliar. Metaphors are, by their nature, imperfect, but we still need to choose them carefully, because bad ones can lead us astray. For example, it’s become very common to compare powerful A.I.s to genies in fairy tales. The metaphor is meant to highlight the difficulty of making powerful entities obey your commands; the computer scientist Stuart Russell has cited the parable of King Midas, who demanded that everything he touched turn into gold, to illustrate the dangers of an A.I. doing what you tell it to do instead of what you want it to do. There are multiple problems with this metaphor, but one of them is that it derives the wrong lessons from the tale to which it refers. The point of the Midas parable is that greed will destroy you, and that the pursuit of wealth will cost you everything that is truly important. If your reading of the parable is that, when you are granted a wish by the gods, you should phrase your wish very, very carefully, then you have missed the point.
So, I would like to propose another metaphor for the risks of artificial intelligence. I suggest that we think about A.I. as a management-consulting firm, along the lines of McKinsey & Company. Firms like McKinsey are hired for a wide variety of reasons, and A.I. systems are used for many reasons, too. But the similarities between McKinsey—a consulting firm that works with ninety per cent of the Fortune 100—and A.I. are also clear. Social-media companies use machine learning to keep users glued to their feeds. In a similar way, Purdue Pharma used McKinsey to figure out how to “turbocharge” sales of OxyContin during the opioid epidemic. Just as A.I. promises to offer managers a cheap replacement for human workers, so McKinsey and similar firms helped normalize the practice of mass layoffs as a way of increasing stock prices and executive compensation, contributing to the destruction of the middle class in America. — Read More
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