20 Nov Google fires software engineer who claims AI chatbot is sentient Google

Google engineer Blake Lemoine thinks its LaMDA AI has come to life

The following table compares some key features of Google Gemini and OpenAI products. However, in late February 2024, Gemini’s image generation feature was halted to undergo google’s ai bot retooling after generated images were shown to depict factual inaccuracies. Google intends to improve the feature so that Gemini can remain multimodal in the long run.

The incorporation of the Palm 2 language model enabled Bard to be more visual in its responses to user queries. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Bard also incorporated Google Lens, letting users upload images in addition to written prompts. The later incorporation of the Gemini language model enabled more advanced reasoning, planning and understanding. It’s a really exciting time to be working on these technologies as we translate deep research and breakthroughs into products that truly help people. Two years ago we unveiled next-generation language and conversation capabilities powered by our Language Model for Dialogue Applications (or LaMDA for short). “We now have machines that can mindlessly generate words, but we haven’t learned how to stop imagining a mind behind them,” said Emily M. Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington.

The multimodal nature of Gemini also enables these different types of input to be combined for generating output. Overall, it appears to perform better than GPT-4, the LLM behind ChatGPT, according to Hugging Face’s chatbot arena board, which AI researchers use to gauge the model’s capabilities, as of the spring of 2024. Sundar is the CEO of Google and Alphabet and serves on Alphabet’s Board of Directors. Under his leadership, Google has been focused on developing products and services, powered by the latest advances in AI, that offer help in moments big and small. Despite Alphabet’s stumble, it’s far too early in the race for generative AI and the development of business models around it to declare a winner, according to Bill Stone, chief investment officer at Glenview Trust Co. Chinese tech companies like Baidu Inc., Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. and NetEase Inc. have also announced plans to expand AI capabilities, fueling gains in their shares.

The speaking practice feature creates an AI bot that keeps up a conversation with users who are learning to speak English.

Google has also pledged to integrate Gemini into the Google Ads platform, providing new ways for advertisers to connect with and engage users. The Duet AI assistant is also set to benefit from Gemini in the future. Then, as part of the initial launch of Gemini on Dec. 6, 2023, Google provided direction on the future of its next-generation LLMs. While Google announced Gemini Ultra, Pro and Nano that day, it did not make Ultra available at the same time as Pro and Nano.

Duolingo, arguably the most popular language learning app, added an AI chatbot in 2016 and integrated GPT-4 in 2023. Another online language learning platform, Memrise, launched a GPT-3-based chatbot on Discord that lets people learn languages while chatting. Other language learning platforms also offer conversation practice.

In addition, since Gemini doesn’t always understand context, its responses might not always be relevant to the prompts and queries users provide. Beyond our own products, we think it’s important to make it easy, safe and scalable for others to benefit from these advances by building on top of our best models. Next month, we’ll start onboarding individual developers, creators and enterprises so they can try our Generative Language API, initially powered by LaMDA with a range of models to follow.

Originally, the feature only provided feedback on spoken sentences. Now, users can practice having ongoing conversations in the language they’re learning. At Google I/O 2023, the company announced Gemini, a large language model created by Google DeepMind. At the time of Google I/O, the company reported that the LLM was still in its early phases. Google then made its Gemini model available to the public in December. Google Labs is a platform where you can test out the company’s early ideas for features and products and provide feedback that affects whether the experiments are deployed and what changes are made before they are released.

Is image generation available in Gemini?

Alphabet cut about 6% of its global workforce — or 12,000 jobs — last month. For the second attempt, I followed Lemoine’s guidance on how to structure my responses, and the dialogue was fluid. The first attempt sputtered out in the kind of mechanized responses you would expect from Siri or Alexa.

Lemoine is not the only engineer who claims to have seen a ghost in the machine recently. The chorus of technologists who believe AI models may not be far off from achieving consciousness is getting bolder. We’ll end with a note that has never appeared on 60 Minutes but one, in the AI revolution, you may be hearing often. Pichai told us he’s being responsible by holding back for more testing, advanced versions of Bard, that, he says, can reason, plan, and connect to internet search. To help cure hallucinations, Bard features a « Google it » button that leads to old-fashioned search.

What Can Google Gemini Do?

Social media users quickly pointed out that the company could’ve fact-checked the exoplanet claim by, well, Googling it. Lemoine maintains that Google has been treating AI ethicists like code debuggers when they should be seen as the interface between technology and society. Gabriel, the Google spokesperson, said Lemoine is a software engineer, not an ethicist. Google put Lemoine on paid administrative leave for violating its confidentiality policy. Lemoine worked with a collaborator to present evidence to Google that LaMDA was sentient. But Google vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Jen Gennai, head of Responsible Innovation, looked into his claims and dismissed them.

• When comparing ChatGPT’s responses with Gemini’s, BI found that Google’s model had an edge at responding to queries regarding current events, identifying AI-generated images, and meal planning.
• After training, the model uses several neural network techniques to be able to understand content, answer questions, generate text and produce outputs.
• Won’t be able to tell Walker or Pichai if Google has found a solution to the end of Search as we know it.

Google Bard AI can also give the latest and most recent news and information. When it started in May, it could answer in English, Korean, and Japanese. However, Google Bard AI can now talk in over 40 additional languages, like Arabic, simple and traditional Chinese, German, Hindi, Spanish, and others.

In a survey of 650 people in the U.S. in May, conducted by Bloomberg Intelligence, 60% of those between ages 16 and 34 said they preferred asking ChatGPT questions to using Google Search. “The younger age group may help drive a permanent shift in how search is used online,” says Mandeep Singh, senior technology analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence. Perhaps as important, there was no obvious way that a chatbot fit with Google’s primary business model—advertising. Compared with Google Search, a summarized answer or a dialogue thread seemed to provide far less opportunity for advertising placement or sponsored links.

Since then, it has grown significantly with two large language model (LLM) upgrades and several updates, and the new name might be a way to leave the past reputation in the past. Google renamed Google Bard to Gemini on February 8 as a nod to Google’s LLM that powers the AI chatbot. « To reflect the advanced tech at its core, Bard will now simply be called Gemini, » said Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, in the announcement. The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people.

But unlike Google Assistant, which offers access to a variety of answers, Gemini is a large language model. It’s an AI trained on books, news stories and similar content so it can learn about words and how they relate to one another to ultimately generate its own output text. While LLMs are improving, they’re still subject to hallucinations, which means they may generate answers that are inaccurate or make Chat GPT no sense. They are also sometimes gullible and can provide different answers to the same query. That’s why it is crucial always to verify, fix, and edit any response from Bard or chatbots that use language models. Apple has said it is working to improve its own AI capabilities, but investors and analysts have questioned whether the company is moving fast enough to keep up with Microsoft, OpenAI and Google.

At the bottom of the screen, click “Enter a prompt here” and type your questions to start your first conversation with Google Bard AI. Bard will offer suggestions to help you figure out what to ask. Lemoine, a software engineer at Google, had been working on the development of LaMDA for months. His experience with the program, described in a recent Washington Post article, caused quite a stir. In the article, Lemoine recounts many dialogues he had with LaMDA in which the two talked about various topics, ranging from technical to philosophical issues. This new abstraction also supports Search and Recommend, and the full name of this service is “Vertex AI Search and Conversation”.

The Chatbot will be supplied with the “private knowledge” and ground its answers to the contents of the website. Google’s blogpost on Tuesday states that it is implementing multiple features, such as digital watermarking and content labels for AI-generated content, to prevent the spread of misinformation at scale. Google doesn’t have a curriculum or a system that levels up students like Duolingo, Babbel, Pimsleur, or other language learning apps.

Plus, the chatbot could write code, compose haikus, craft high school history papers, create marketing plans, and offer life coaching. Last year, Google said LaMDA was built on the company’s research showing transformer-based language models trained on dialogue could learn to talk about essentially anything. In May, Facebook parent Meta opened its language model to academics, civil society and government organizations. Joelle Pineau, managing director of Meta AI, said it’s imperative that tech companies improve transparency as the technology is being built.

Unlike ChatGPT, however, Bard will give several versions — or « drafts » — of its answer for you to choose from. You’ll then be able to ask follow-up questions or ask the same question again if you don’t like any of the responses offered. So he posed questions to the company’s AI chatbot, LaMDA, to see if its answers revealed any bias against, say, certain religions. Users have also caught SGE engaging in plagiarism—lifting answers verbatim from websites, and then not providing a link to the original source. “What’s inherently tricky about the technology is it doesn’t actually always know where it knows things from,” Reid says.

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When it launched speaking practice, the company said it helps learners not just practice but also figure out the best words or conjugations to use within the context of a conversation. While Google has had a translation feature for years, the company has also been growing the number of languages its AI models understand. Like most AI chatbots, Gemini can code, answer math problems, and help with your writing needs. To access it, all you have to do is visit the Gemini website and sign into your Google account. ZDNET’s recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites.

Gemini is able to generate images from text prompts, similar to other AI art generators like Dall-E, Midjourey and Stable Diffusion. Google’s management has been moving fast to get Bard out the door after the company was caught off guard by the arrival of OpenAI’s ChatGPT late last year. Google is emphasizing that this is an early experiment and says that Bard will run on an « efficient and optimized » version of LaMDA, the large language model that underpins the tool. Users will be met with a warning that « Bard will not always get it right » when they open it.

According to Google, Gemini Ultra (the model’s most advanced version) outperformed GPT-4 on the majority of the most used academic benchmarks in language model research and development, as well as various multimodal tasks. But the margins were slim, indicating that Gemini Pro (the smaller model size that powers the Gemini chatbot) likely doesn’t come out ahead of GPT-4. Gemini has always had real-time access to Google’s search index, which can “keep feeding” the model information, Hinkle said. So the Gemini chatbot can draw on data pulled from the internet to answer queries, and is fine-tuned to select data chosen from sources that fit specific topics, such as scientific research or coding.

In the future, Gemini will be trained on the v5p, Google’s fastest and most efficient chip yet. Meanwhile, GPT-4o was trained on Nvidia’s H100 GPUs, one of the most sought-after AI chips today. After training, Gemini leveraged several neural network techniques to better understand its training data. Specifically, Gemini was built on Transformer — a neural network architecture Google invented in 2017 that is now used by virtually all LLMs, including the ones that power ChatGPT. This capability was temporarily halted to undergo retooling after Google was criticized on social media for producing images that depicted specific white figures as people of color.

It will have its own app on Android phones, and on Apple mobile devices Gemini will be baked into the primary Google app. Google Gemini works by first being trained on a massive corpus of data. After training, the model uses several neural network techniques to be able to understand content, answer questions, generate text and produce outputs. In February 2024, Google paused Gemini’s image generation tool after people criticized it for spitting out historically inaccurate photos of US presidents. The company also restricted its AI chatbot from answering questions about the 2024 US presidential election to curb the spread of fake news and misinformation. And, in general, Gemini has guardrails that prevent it from answering questions it deems unsafe.

You can also ask Gemini to create images, just like you can with ChatGPT Plus and Microsoft Copilot (aka Bing Chat). Write your prompt for Gemini to generate the image in the same chat window. Google Bard AI shows a remarkable leap in artificial intelligence, considering it is also one of the best ChatGPT alternatives out there.

You can also use AI Rewriter Tools to rewrite those summaries written by Bard and make them more readable and polished. Some of the tools you can use are Frase.io, AI SEO, and Pre Post SEO. Reading long articles or content can sometimes be tedious, especially if we only want the summary of the content we are reading. Here are 8 ways in which Bard AI can enhance your creativity and optimize the time you spend on your tasks.

Gemini can generate text, whether that’s used to engage in written conversations with users, proofread essays, write cover letters or translate content into different languages. Gemini can also understand, explain and generate code in some of the most popular programming languages, including Python, Java, C++ and Go. Gemini is multimodal, meaning its capabilities span text, image and audio applications. It can generate natural written language, transcribe speeches, create artwork, analyze videos and more, although not all of these capabilities are yet available to the general public. Like other AI models, Gemini is expected to get better over time as the industry continues to advance.

It wrote an instant essay in economics and recommended five books. This very human trait, error with confidence, is called, in the industry, hallucination. In five seconds, there was a poem written by a machine with breathtaking insight into the mystery of faith, Bard wrote « she knew her baby’s soul would always be alive. » The humanity, at superhuman speed, was a shock. Then, we played with a famous six word short story, often attributed to Hemingway.

When Bard became available, Google gave no indication that it would charge for use. Google has no history of charging customers for services, excluding enterprise-level usage of Google Cloud. The assumption was that the chatbot would be integrated into Google’s basic search engine, and therefore be free to use. Gemini 1.0 was announced on Dec. 6, 2023, and built by Alphabet’s Google DeepMind business unit, which is focused on advanced AI research and development.

Though they’re often perceived as all-knowing machines, AI bots frequently state incorrect information as fact because they’re designed to fill in gaps. Shares for Google’s parent company, Alphabet, dropped 9% Wednesday after its AI chatbot, Bard, gave an incorrect answer. I asked LaMDA for bold ideas about fixing climate change, an example cited by true believers of a potential future benefit of these kind of models. LaMDA suggested public transportation, eating less meat, buying food in bulk, and reusable bags, linking out to two websites. If something like LaMDA is widely available, but not understood, “It can be deeply harmful to people understanding what they’re experiencing on the internet,” she said. Google spokesperson Gabriel drew a distinction between recent debate and Lemoine’s claims.

Bard also integrated with several Google apps and services, including YouTube, Maps, Hotels, Flights, Gmail, Docs and Drive, enabling users to apply the AI tool to their personal content. Both Gemini and ChatGPT are AI chatbots designed for interaction with people through NLP and machine learning. Both use an underlying LLM for generating and creating conversational text. Google Gemini is a direct competitor to the GPT-3 and GPT-4 models from OpenAI.

These AI tools are trained on information available on the web to answer users’ queries. Instead of giving them a list of websites where that answer may or may not be found, these tools generate a textual response conversationally. The first version of Bard used a lighter-model version of Lamda that required less computing power to scale to more concurrent users.

The Gemini architecture supports directly ingesting text, images, audio waveforms and video frames as interleaved sequences. But for $19.99 a month, users can access Gemini Advanced, a version the company claims is « far more capable at https://chat.openai.com/ reasoning, following, instructions, coding, and creative inspiration » than the free one. It released Bard, its first AI chatbot, in early 2022, though it later folded that into its family of large language models that it calls Gemini.

Precisely because of such concerns, regulation will shape Google’s future. Companies, including Google, were voluntarily committing to several steps around public transparency, safety testing, and security of their A.I. But Congress and the Biden administration may well impose additional guardrails. Act nearing completion may pose challenges for Alphabet, by requiring transparency around A.I.

A chatbot test Business Insider did in 2023 illustrates Gemini’s seemingly superior capabilities. When comparing ChatGPT’s responses with Gemini’s, BI found that Google’s model had an edge at responding to queries regarding current events, identifying AI-generated images, and meal planning. ChatGPT, however, spat out more conversational responses, making interacting with the AI feel more enjoyable and human-like. Back in the 2000s, the company said it applied machine learning techniques to Google Search to correct users’ spelling and used them to create services like Google Translate. We have a long history of using AI to improve Search for billions of people. BERT, one of our first Transformer models, was revolutionary in understanding the intricacies of human language.

The push to produce a robotic intelligence that can fully leverage the wide breadth of movements opened up by bipedal humanoid design has been a key topic for researchers. To give users more control over the contacts an app can and cannot access, the permissions screen has two stages. I’m asking Gemini to « create an image for a social media post of a plate of food to advertise a Caribbean food festival. » Like other popular AI chatbots available for widespread use, the Gemini chat window has been optimized to be user-friendly and easy to navigate.

• The self-learning program spent about two weeks testing different moves.
• Right now, Bard is not part of Google Search, but Google plans to put them together soon.
• The first version of Bard used a lighter-model version of Lamda that required less computing power to scale to more concurrent users.
• It’s able to understand and recognize images, enabling it to parse complex visuals, such as charts and figures, without the need for external optical character recognition (OCR).

One prompt engineer, who asked to remain anonymous, gets upward of 3,000 queries to go over with Gemini. Dr. Mihai, with a team of four, says she powered through 12,000 over the course of four days. When ChatGPT dropped, she “spent all night fighting with it.” Despite an experience she described as “dystopian,” she was inspired to pursue a career in AI ethics, trying to handle the fledgling technology. Editing text and debugging code are not such different tasks, he argues. Contrast that to the rush to recruit coders during the tech boom and all the perks offered to programmers. Observers say the devaluing of the humanities and those who study literature and the arts by the tech industry is shortsighted – especially in an AI age.

But sensibleness isn’t the only thing that makes a good response. After all, the phrase “that’s nice” is a sensible response to nearly any statement, much in the way “I don’t know” is a sensible response to most questions. Satisfying responses also tend to be specific, by relating clearly to the context of the conversation. It can be literal or figurative, flowery or plain, inventive or informational. That versatility makes language one of humanity’s greatest tools — and one of computer science’s most difficult puzzles. Our research team is continually exploring new ideas at the frontier of AI, building innovative products that show consistent progress on a range of benchmarks.

Gemini Pro will first power text-based prompts in Bard to start, Hsiao said, but it will expand to multimodal support — meaning texts and images or other modalities — in the coming months. Future releases are expected to include multimodal capabilities, where a chatbot processes multiple forms of input and produces outputs in different ways. Gemini uses Gemini Pro, Google’s proprietary LLM, instead of OpenAI’s GPT series, the technology many popular AI chatbots use.

Tech companies are racing to improve the capabilities of their AI assistants, envisioning a world where chatbots help people do most of their online tasks. “It’s a super-important first step toward building a true AI assistant,” said Sissie Hsiao, vice president and general manager of Google Assistant and Gemini. Google will charge $20 a month for its “Gemini Advanced” AI model, selling it as a new, premium tier of its cloud storage subscription, which nearly 100 million people already pay $2 to $10 a month for.

The Pro model is designed for performance and deployment at scale. As of Dec. 13, 2023, Google enabled access to Gemini Pro in Google Cloud Vertex AI and Google AI Studio. For code, a version of Gemini Pro is being used to power the Google AlphaCode 2 generative AI coding technology.