Alphabet Chairman Hennessy: The technology for Bard was immature

Alphabet Chairman Hennessy: The technology for Bard was immature

San Francisco, 2/17/2023

According to Alphabet chairman John Hennessy, Google may have held back from making its Bard chatbot a publicly available product because it didn’t think the technology was ready yet.

In an interview with CNBC, Hennessy said the Bard is a „great piece of technology“ that can now serve as a demonstration vehicle. He believes that generative AI models are a year or two away from becoming „really useful“ tools for the general public.

Google may have been reluctant to release Bard publicly for fear it would generate false or harmful information, Hennessy said.

„They don’t want to put out a system that either says wrong things or sometimes says toxic things,“ he said.

AI models that generate speech „are still in their infancy – figuring out how to fit them into a product stream and do it in a way that is mindful of correctness and issues like toxicity,“ Hennessey told CNBC.

Last week, Google announced Bard, a conversational AI service, a day after Microsoft unveiled its AI-powered Bing service.

The same day, it was discovered that Bard had made a mistake that caused Google to lose $100 billion in market value on Wednesday.

The backlash follows an all-hands meeting in December when Google executives said the company was taking a conservative approach to using AI technology in its web search.

While the technology „mets a need that people seem to have,“ language models still have a lot of problems to solve and „can invent things,“ said Google AI chief Jeff Dean.