Alphabet stock price drops after Google Bard launch blunder:
About 10 percent of Alphabet's market value – some $120 billion – was wiped out this week after Google proudly presented Bard, its answer to Microsoft's next-gen AI offerings, and the system bungled a simple question.
In a promotional video to show off Bard, a web search assistant to compete against Microsoft's ChatGPT-enhanced Bing, the software answered a science question incorrectly, sending Alphabet's share price down amid an overall lackluster launch by the Chocolate Factory.
Microsoft's integration of OpenAI's super-hyped language models into the Bing search engine and Edge web browser has ignited an arms race. Microsoft wants to eat into Google's web search monopoly by offering a better search engine that uses OpenAI's ChatGPT to answer queries in a conversational way with natural language rather than simple lists of links to relevant webpages.
The idea being that the bot is trained on fresh snapshots of the web, and netizens' web search requests are answered automatically by the bot with summaries of info scraped from the internet.
The Chocolate Factory is not about to give up any of its territory without a fight, though it stumbled at the first hurdle with its launch of ChatGPT rival Bard on Wednesday.
In an example query-response offered by Google's spinners, Bard was asked to explain discoveries made by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) at a level a nine-year-old would understand. Some of the text generated by the model, however, was wrong.
Bard claimed "JWST took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system," yet the first image of just such an exoplanet, 2M1207b, was actually captured by the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope in 2004, according to NASA.
[...] Meanwhile, Microsoft on Tuesday teased a preview version of its OpenAI-boosted Bing that people can eventually use, fingers crossed, and announced features coming to its Chromium-based Edge browser. Google plans to integrate Bard into its own search engine, though it's not clear when it'll be generally available yet.
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Last week, Microsoft researchers announced an experimental framework to control robots and drones using the language abilities of ChatGPT, a popular AI language model created by OpenAI. Using natural language commands, ChatGPT can write special code that controls robot movements. A human then views the results and adjusts as necessary until the task gets completed successfully.
The research arrived in a paper titled "ChatGPT for Robotics: Design Principles and Model Abilities," authored by Sai Vemprala, Rogerio Bonatti, Arthur Bucker, and Ashish Kapoor of the Microsoft Autonomous Systems and Robotics Group.
In a demonstration video, Microsoft shows robots—apparently controlled by code written by ChatGPT while following human instructions—using a robot arm to arrange blocks into a Microsoft logo, flying a drone to inspect the contents of a shelf, or finding objects using a robot with vision capabilities.
To get ChatGPT to interface with robotics, the researchers taught ChatGPT a custom robotics API. When given instructions like "pick up the ball," ChatGPT can generate robotics control code just as it would write a poem or complete an essay. After a human inspects and edits the code for accuracy and safety, the human operator can execute the task and evaluate its performance.
In this way, ChatGPT accelerates robotic control programming, but it's not an autonomous system. "We emphasize that the use of ChatGPT for robotics is not a fully automated process," reads the paper, "but rather acts as a tool to augment human capacity."
Shares of Baidu fell as much as 10 percent on Thursday after the web search company showed only a pre-recorded video of its AI chatbot Ernie in the first public release of China's answer to ChatGPT.
The Beijing-based tech company has claimed Ernie will remake its business and for weeks talked up plans to incorporate generative artificial intelligence into its search engine and other products.
But on Thursday, millions of people tuning in to the event were left with little idea of whether Baidu's chatbot could compete with ChatGPT.
[...]
"We can only explore by ourselves. Training ChatGPT took OpenAI more than a year, and it took them another year to tune GPT-4," said one Baidu employee. "It means we're two years behind."Baidu did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10, @10:20PM (7 children)
That's what it replied? Oh Bar--D. That name though, i mean, meh... that's the best the great minds at google can come up with? Bob is a better name.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday February 10, @10:36PM (2 children)
Just want to add that no disrespect to anyone named Bard, but ain't no one ever heard of someone named Bard outside their family. It's not a bad name in itself, but for a flagship product that's supposed to be the future of everything, maybe something a bit more umpf or how ever you spell that.
And also, Microsoft beat Google to the name Bob, though it wasn't an AI product, so i call that 2-0 to Microsoft. Not that i enjoy it.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday February 11, @02:34AM (1 child)
I consider that a universal loss for Microsoft unless it's competing heads up with the Church of the Subgenius, then it's folly of the highest order and they will lose more than a point in that one.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12, @06:46AM
Did someone say Slack? Bob would roll in his grave, if he could summon the motivation.
(Score: 3, Funny) by takyon on Friday February 10, @11:57PM (3 children)
I like the name. But it had better be able to compose poems on day 1 of general availability.
https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-chatgpt-wrote-poem-about-bing-beating-google-2023-2 [businessinsider.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Saturday February 11, @04:11PM (2 children)
Your post reminds me of the ST:TNG episode where Data tries to learn humor, the "Saturday Night Live" episode (Memory Alpha I think), since both Whoopie Goldberg and Joe Piscopo were in the cast. Joe tries to teach Data comedy.
In the movie Short Circuit the researcher believes the robot is actually sentient when it actually gets the joke. That was the only part of that movie that was more realistic than a Road Runner cartoon. Comedians and humorists, even the funniest, can't define "funny" any better than "something that makes people laugh.".
Older than dirt? Kid, I was a BETA TESTER for dirt! We never did get all the bugs out.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday February 12, @11:47AM
A lot of comedy takes several strong alcoholic drinks first before the comedian says a word.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday February 13, @02:43PM
Short Circuit was a fun movie, though. Johnny-Five, Alive!
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0, Troll) by crafoo on Saturday February 11, @05:53AM
Is google the new at&t? they certainly seem like it. no chance of breaking them up tho. I mean, you can't really break up a department of the NSA. Well, the contracts would get messier at least.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday February 11, @08:36PM
Is it just me, or does anyone else fail to see the value in these robo-bullshitters? Hey Bard, give me some long-winded verbiage of a concept that's probably wrong. I got plenty of that at work from above and below.