Worried that their competitor, Microsoft, was pulling ahead in the new excitement over ChatGPT AI search results, Google announced this week that they were launching their AI powered search, BARD, and posted a demo on Twitter.
Amazingly, Google failed to fact-check the information BARD was giving to the public, and it wasn't long before others figured out that it was giving false information.
Google's stocks lost 7.7% of their valuation that day, and then another 4% the next day, for a total loss of over $150 BILLION.
Yesterday (Friday, February 10, 2022), Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president at Google and head of Google Search, told Germany's Welt am Sonntag newspaper:
"This kind of artificial intelligence we're talking about right now can sometimes lead to something we call hallucination.
This then expresses itself in such a way that a machine provides a convincing but completely made-up answer," Raghavan said in comments published in German. One of the fundamental tasks, he added, was keeping this to a minimum.
This tendency to be prone to "hallucination" does not appear to be unique to Google's AI and chat bot.
OpenAI, the company that has developed ChatGPT which Microsoft is investing heavily in, also warns that their AI may also deliver "plausible-sounding but incorrect or nonsensical answers."
So since these new AI chat bots are so unreliable and so easily hacked, why are investors and Big Tech companies like Google and Microsoft throwing $BILLIONS into them?
Because people are using them, probably hundreds of millions of people. That's the metric that always drives investment in new Big Tech products that are often nothing more than fads and gimmicks.
But if a lot of people are using these products, there is money to be made, and yet another way to track and control people.