Google and other big tech companies this week showed how conversational chatbots can help improve internet search.
In one instance, however, Google may have inadvertently pointed out the gaps in the technology.
google on monday tweeted a GIF demonstrating how one would use his new experimental AI chat serviceBard.
Built on Google’s Large Language Models (LLM), Bard is designed to give users conversational answers to relatively complex questions.
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To demonstrate this, the GIF shows Bard answering the question: “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9-year-old about?” Bard’s answers, on the face of it, seem helpful. However, observers quickly noticed that the chatbot was providing inaccurate information.
“JWST took the first-ever images of a planet outside our own solar system,” Bard said in his response.
In fact, the first photo of an exoplanet was taken in 2004 by the VLT (Very Large Telescope) of the European Southern Observatory.
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While Google’s tweet was still live Wednesday morning (and seen by more than a million Twitter users), Google acknowledged the error in a statement provided to ZDNET.
“This underscores the importance of a rigorous testing process, something we’re launching this week with our Trusted Tester program,” a Google spokesperson said in a statement. “We will combine external feedback with our own internal testing to ensure that Bard’s responses achieve a high level of quality, security, and grounding in real-world information.”
While Google has announced plans to roll out Bard to the general public in the coming weeks, the chatbot is initially being tested by a number of users.
Meanwhile, Microsoft on Tuesday unveiled a new version of the Bing search engine running on a large next-gen OpenAI language model, which makes it “more powerful than ChatGPT” – a conversational chatbot that is rapidly gaining popularity. OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT, also recently introduced their own premium version of the chatbot, ChatGPT Plus.