Some blame Google’s slow start on concerns that the technology could hurt the company’s reputation if it’s released before it’s fully ready for public consumption, according to people familiar with internal discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share information that has not been made public. Other AI leaders, like Meta’s chief artificial intelligence scientist Yann LeCun, have said tools released by the bigger tech companies have appeared to be less interesting and capable than ones released by smaller start-ups because they have more guardrails to prevent offensive or harmful outcomes.

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Though Google and other companies have worked on the tech for years, and some of the computer science behind the latest products was theorised decades ago, the bots continue to surprise their creators as well as regular people with what they can do.

“Things are moving pretty fast,” said Larry Birnbaum, a computer science professor at Northwestern University who focuses on AI. “Even the people who work on these machines, many of them have been quite surprised by their capabilities.”

Google’s CEO has called AI “more profound than fire or electricity” and Big Tech companies like Google are scrambling to ride the wave and assure their dominance over the internet and tech development isn’t threatened by the disruptive technology.

When Microsoft unveiled that its own chatbot was named Bing — after its search engine — and would become a key part of the company’s search tool, concerns from investors that Google was falling behind in its core business began growing.

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But replacing search with chatbots would upend the massive economy of content creators and advertisers that Google has helped create with its search engine.

Countless news organisations, bloggers and other web publishers rely on traffic from Google search, and the entire search engine optimisation industry has sprung up to help publishers understand Google’s opaque and ever-changing search algorithm.

The tech giant also relies on a thriving internet to give people things to search for in the first place, bringing in consumers for it to track and target with advertising.

Chatbots from Google’s competitors are already being used by millions of people to draft essays and reports, screen potential romantic partners and write computer code. Images made by AI tools like OpenAI’s DALL-E and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion have flooded social media for months, drawing wonder and consternation, while triggering debates on what it means to be an artist and how copyright laws should be applied to AI-generated content. Venture capitalists are pouring billions of dollars into AI start-ups, even as the rest of the tech funding ecosystem retrenches.

Google’s Bard is very similar to the bots released by Microsoft and OpenAI. Users type in a question in a text box, and the bot responds with answers. The number of questions and responses are capped to prevent the bot from being prodded into developing a combative personality, as happened with Microsoft’s Bing chatbot after users had multi-hour conversations with it. The company also has turned off Bard’s ability to produce computer code, a key limitation compared to ChatGPT.

The Washington Post