How will Google and Microsoft AI chatbots affect us and the way we work?

Google and Microsoft are going head-to-head on the future of search, leveraging the technology behind artificial intelligence chatbots.

Google announced Monday that it is testing Bard, a competitor to the Microsoft-backed ChatGPT that has quickly become a sensation, and will be rolling it out to the public in the coming weeks.

ChatGPT, developed by San Francisco-based OpenAI, has reached 100 million users since its public launch in November. Microsoft is now integrating the technology behind it into its products, with the Bing search engine being a focal point. The company will provide an update on its plans with AI later Tuesday.

Here are some questions about Google and Microsoft’s AI plans and their likely impact.

Why are Google and Microsoft using AI in search?

Response to ChatGPT shows there is an appetite for AI-powered search and responses to queries that are more than just a link to a website. Microsoft clearly sees this as a competitive opportunity, as does Google, judging by its quick response. Google also believes that users increasingly want to access information in more natural, intuitive ways (e.g. Google Lens, which allows people to search using images and text).

Dan Ives, analyst at US financial services firm Wedbush Securities, says, “While Bing only accounts for about 9% of the search market today, further integration of this unique ChatGPT tool and algorithms into Microsoft’s search platform could result in large market share shifts from Google.”

What technology is behind the chatbots from Google and ChatGPT?

Bard and ChatGPT are both based on so-called large language models. Google’s is called LaMDA, an acronym for “Language Model for Dialogue Applications”. These are types of neural networks that mimic the underlying architecture of the brain in computer form. They are fed vast amounts of text from the Internet in a process that teaches them to generate responses to text-based prompts. This allows ChatGPT to provide credible-sounding answers to questions about composing couplets, writing resumes, or, in what is probably the biggest panic it’s caused yet, academic work.

How is Bard different from ChatGPT?

Google hasn’t made Bard public yet, but it’s using up-to-date information from around the web and has reportedly been able to answer questions about 12,000 layoffs announced by Google’s parent company Alphabet last month. ChatGPT’s dataset — in the form of billions of words — extends to 2021, but the chatbot is still in the research preview phase.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Bard could answer a question about explaining new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a nine-year-old. It can also inform users about the best forwards in football “currently” and provide training drills to emulate top players. Screenshots provided by Google showed a more polished user interface than ChatGPT’s, but it’s still not publicly available, making direct comparisons with the competing OpenAI service difficult.

How will the technology behind Bard and ChatGPT transform Google and Microsoft’s search engines?

Google says its search engine will use its latest AI technologies such as LaMDA, PaLM, image generator Imagen and music creator MusicLM. The example Pichai presented Monday was a chatbot-like conversational response to a question about whether it’s easier to learn the guitar or the piano. It appeared at the top of the search query instead of, say, a link to a blog post or website. Again, Google hasn’t released this AI-powered search model to the public, leaving questions unanswered.

Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered revamp of Bing has also been kept under wraps, but several users said they caught a glimpse of it last week. The unconfirmed screenshots showed the “new Bing” answering questions in a conversational style and citing sources for the answers, possibly reflecting concerns from some ChatGPT users about the accuracy of some answers. It also reportedly uses up-to-date information from around the web and is based on a faster version of ChatGPT.

Will generative AI change our jobs?

Generative AI, or artificial intelligence, which can create novel content from text to audio to images to user prompts, is already making an impact and has fueled fears it could replace a number of jobs. Buzzfeed will use OpenAI technology to improve its quizzes and personalize some content, the Wall Street Journal said in a memo.

Buzzfeed executive director Jonah Peretti said humans would provide ideas and “cultural currency” as part of any AI-powered creative process. In Hollywood, AI is being used to age actors, while ITV has created a sketch show based on deepfake celebrities.

Michael Wooldridge, Professor of Computer Science at Oxford University, said some industries will feel a significant impact.

“Generative AI is going to have a big impact in some industries — those who make boilerplate copy for a living will feel the impact soon,” he said. “When we search the web, browsers are much better at understanding what we’re looking for and presenting the results in a way we understand – as if we’re asking our query to a person rather than a machine.”

He added that ChatGPT and other similar systems can have flaws and get things wrong, as OpenAI chatbot users have noticed.

“Treating them as sages is really not a good idea,” he says. “Until we know how to make it reliable, this isn’t a good use of the technology: best stick to the things it’s really good at, like summarizing a piece of text and extracting key points from it.”

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