Google accepts the challenge

Google accepts the challenge

San Francisco, 2/5/2023

Google CEO Sundar Pichai says the company will release its most powerful and latest language model „very soon“ to complement its search engine. People will be able to interact directly with the conversational model called LaMDA „in experimental and innovative ways,“ he said.

Google plans to release the advanced AI „in the coming weeks and months“ to gather feedback from users, Pichai said. The company is said to be internally testing an experimental search site that uses AI chat technology. As soon as a user enters a query, the program provides human-like answers.

AI was also a highlight among executives during yesterday’s fourth-quarter earnings call. In the opening remarks, Pichai said, „AI is the most profound technology we’re working on today.“

He also said Google will eventually offer new APIs and tools to empower developers and creators to discover „new possibilities“ with AI. Such models are particularly good at summarizing, authoring and constructing content, he said, adding that Google will be ramping up slowly as the technology is still in its „early days“.

It’s possible that Google could introduce the AI-powered search engine and/or a chatbot next week. Google announced a streaming event on Wednesday, February 8th. According to a description, Google is using artificial intelligence to „rethink how people search for, explore and interact with information, making it more natural and intuitive than ever to find what you need.“ “

Google is working on a chatbot called „Apprentice Bard“ based on LaMDA that will likely be integrated into its search engine.

Google has invested around $300 million in Anthropic, an AI startup that has developed a chatbot to compete with ChatGPT. According to The Financial Times, the deal gives Google a 10 percent stake in Anthropic, which could now be valued at $5 billion. The startup has partnered with Google and will buy cloud computing and resources from the tech giant.

According to a press release today, Google Cloud is now Anthropic’s preferred cloud provider. The partnership includes Google Cloud building large GPU and TPU clusters for Anthropic to train its AI systems.

According to The Times, Google invested the $300 million in Anthropic sometime in late 2022, but the funding wasn’t reported at the time. Notably, a Bloomberg report claims that Google invested nearly $400 million in Anthropic. The companies have not disclosed the exact amount of the investment.

Anthropic recently introduced a general-purpose AI assistant, Claude, which is being viewed as a possible rival to OpenAI and Google chatbots. Claude is currently in a closed beta available through a Slack integration.

Dario Amodei, former VP of Research at OpenAI, co-founded Anthropic with his sister Daniela Amodei, formerly VP of Safety and Policy at OpenAI. Both worked on OpenAI’s GPT-3 language model. Amodei left OpenAI „after a disagreement over the company’s direction“ and took some OpenAI researchers with it.

The investment underscores the growing AI competition between Google and Microsoft, which has already allied with ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

Last week it was reported that Microsoft is investing $10 billion in OpenAI, adding to the billions it has already deployed in 2019 and 2021.