By Natasha Lomas
Published on February 23, 2023
It’s still pretty early in the year but the disruptive power of general purpose AI (GPAI) already looks cemented as the big tech story of 2023, with tech giants including Microsoft and Google duking it out to fast-follow OpenAI’s viral conversational chatbot, ChatGPT by productizing large language models (LLM) in interfaces of their own — such as OpenAI investor Microsoft’s search with AI combo, New Bing; or Google’s conversational search offering, Bard AI, shown off in preview earlier this month as it’s scrambled to respond to Remond’s challenge to the online search cash-cow.
Big Tech’s haste to productize general purpose AI has offered a high speed and very public lesson in embedded risk attached to this flavor of AI — which typically requires vast amounts of data to train models (in the case of OpenAI’s GPT, for instance, this has included pulling data from Internet forums like Reddit) — with, for example, Google’s Bard AI producing erroneous answers to pretty simply search queries in its own official demo of the tech; while, unleashed onto early users, Microsoft’s New Bing was quickly encouraged to spew forth the kind of conspiracy nonsense, reprehensible bile and random threats that’s easy to run into on the average (under-moderated) online forum or comment thread, as well as making basic errors.