Imagine that your company has hired an attractive new employee. The executive suite’s rising star was so glamorous that rival companies hired lookalikes. The buzz around them is intoxicating. From the CEO to the shareholders, everyone seems to agree that this man is the future of the entire business.
Then we learn that the executive has what is politely called a “hallucination problem”(opens in new tab)” Every time they open their mouth, they have a 15-20% chance of making a hoax.(opens in new tab)A Princeton University professor calls the guy a bullshit generator(opens in new tab)They literally can’t tell the truth out of fiction(opens in new tab)They will be on stage to announce their new product in five minutes. Do you still have them in the limelight?
Microsoft and Google’s answer this week was yes. Inspired by the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT (artificial intelligence chatbot), Microsoft held a surprise event last minute, announcing that OpenAI would bring ChatGPT-style search to his Bing search engine and Edge. browser. Google unveiled its own, his AI search tool Bard the day before, and the next day at an event in Paris, which itself ran into the problem of hallucinations.
“The new competition starts today,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told reporters at the campus in Redmond, Washington on Tuesday.yes, isn’t it pretty to think so(opens in new tab)Consider that Microsoft has always been the uncool kid on the tech bloc and Bing (sorry, “the new Bing”) is competing with Google Search on everything.?
Google’s Pre-Response Announcing The Bard(opens in new tab) Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote:
Google and the “hallucination problem”
This is an important point. The world leader in search, Google, has spent years embedding AI, while ChatGPT competitor Bard is barely in beta with a small group of testers. Despite Pichai’s hipster temperament, there was some unplanned chaos at the bard’s unveiling. Google, too, seems to have been put off by all the ChatGPT talk.
How else can you explain the embarrassing bard mistake that was fully displayed at launch? A user is shown asking Bird what facts he can tell a 9-year-old about the James Webb Space Telescope. I’m here. One of the “facts” that JWST took the first photo of an exoplanet is not true.The bard was hallucinating(opens in new tab).
No wonder parent company Alphabet lost 8% of its stock on Bard’s launch day. Google has centered the main problem with his AI search, further suggesting that it cannot use its own vast vault of data to do fact-checking for him.
Considering I already had a “hallucination problem” with featured snippets, Google should know better.(opens in new tab) It was the top search result in 2017. The snippet algorithm seemed to enjoy lying, especially about the President of the United States. Again, what could go wrong?
Never Trust a Single Source: The New Rules for Learning Online
In other words, if you start your AI search tool too early, you run the risk of playing yourself. Microsoft was lucky in the sense that it didn’t show any obvious errors at the announcement event. But if ChatGPT-based search wasn’t riddled with glitches, why is it in such an interim beta stage? Side note: If you’re interested in Bing’s free AI QA, there’s a sign-up sheet.(opens in new tab).
Sarah Bird, head of Responsible AI at Microsoft (that’s a descriptive title!) Wired ChatGPT hallucination problem(opens in new tab)Yeah, no kidding: The 15% hallucination figure comes from companies in the race to build ChatGPT fact-checkers.(opens in new tab).
Byrd added that previous versions of the software could have helped users plan school shootings, but that feature has been disabled. Good to know! What could go wrong next? Certainly, this psychedelic beta search product has no other unintended consequences lurking that could embarrass the gigantic, legally vulnerable tech giant.
Clippy. Zune. new bing.
Of course, Microsoft knows out of shame. It’s Microsoft who gave us Clippy, he’s one of the biggest misfires in the history of software. The Paperclip Assistant was notorious for giving out unnecessary advice. ChatGPT isn’t Clippy in the sense that it asks questions.
But the fact that it often hallucinates its response, or gives users a run-of-the-mill variation of “I can’t answer that” more often than you might think, is what makes ChatGPT-enabled Bing If casual users of “New Bing” get enough garbled results, it will be memorable.
It doesn’t matter if the product improves later. The first common reaction is what you can turn it into a punchline. Microsoft should know that too. It gave us the Zune. Rolling out his ChatGPT product before it’s ready for prime time is no exception.
Honestly, “The New Bing” already wants to be the punch line. Or, whatever “win” here really means, are you really ready to ditch Google search and the Chrome browser if Bing and Edge win the AI search race? . Technology inertia is an underrated force.
ChatGPT is impressive in several situations — realtors especially love it(opens in new tab) For list-making — and to evoke fear in others. But if you dig under the headlines, every article about that mess somehow seems small… would lead to a wave of student plagiarism!But you can also find out when the paper was written by ChatGPT(opens in new tab), neutralizes its own threat. I passed my law school exam!Except that I really just scraped it off with the C-plus(opens in new tab).
Building a digital equivalent of the human brain, known in the AI world as “general-purpose AI,” TRUE difficult.We are just beginning to reach the stage of insect intelligence.(opens in new tab), another long-standing AI goal. Can you really trust ChatGPT to give you search results instead of clicking links yourself?
The answer depends on how much of a hallucination problem you, dear reader, have had yourself.
