In November, a budding start-up OpenAI introduced ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer), an Artificial Intelligence-power chatbot. It is powerful and several leagues above any chatbot in the industry. It can converse as naturally as between two humans. With Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) algorithm, the ChatGPT smartly answers almost all queries and gets information almost precise to the point compared to normal search engine results. It is even witty with jokes too, can write software programming codes and recently, it even cleared the complex Wharton MBA exam and a medical licensing test in the US.
Yes, ChatGPT sometimes falters at things, but the overall execution of the chatbot is very impressive and people on social media platforms have even gone so far as saying it can one day replace Google Search. Even Microsoft, one of the top funders of OpenAI, is planning to integrate GhatGPT into its suite of productivity tools.
For obvious reasons, it has woken up sleeping giant Google. As it wades through the business downturn (Google is sacking 12,000 employees in 2023), the search engine giant doubling down on its effort to have a proprietary ChatGPT alternative, which can deliver even better results.
Google had previously demoed very interesting AI products such as Duplex (launched at I/O 2018), which are available on Pixel phones in select regions. It can help phone owners to set up reservations at hotels or salons and even monitor e-commerce platforms to see if a product is in stock or not.
There is LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), which was demoed during I/O 2021 and it is the closest rival to ChatGPT. "It can engage in a free-flowing way about a seemingly endless number of topics, an ability we think could unlock more natural ways of interacting with technology and entirely new categories of helpful applications," Google said.
It should be noted that LaMDA works on Transformer, a neural network architecture that Google Research invented and open-sourced in 2017. It is the very same code used by ChatGPT and BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers).
But, Google has not made LaMDA available to the public, as there was room for improvement, particularly in making it stick with actual facts. So, the company was going slow in making it perfect and as you can see now, OpenAI seems to have taken a lead with ChatGPT over Google.
Stung by the ChatGPT's popularity and intelligence, Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who had passed on the baton to Sundar Pichai to manage Google (& parent company Alphabet Inc), were called in for a high-level brainstorming session at Google HQ to come up with a faster and better action plan to take on Open AI's ChatGPT, reported The New York Times.
It has come to light that Google has plans to demo a ChatGPT alternative for better comprehension skills and deliver precise answers to queries.
However, there is no official word whether it will be called LaMDA or any other name, but Google is expected to show more than 20 similar AI products including 'Shopping Try-on' for YouTube (to help users try on new clothes), Maya: (3D image generator), video summarization tool, a Pixel exclusive wallpaper generator, an AI tool for enterprise customers to developer their own ChatGPT-like bot, Colab + Android Studio (to help software programmers to detect and fix bugs) and more at upcoming annual Google I/O developer conclave.
It is believed that Google's AI products are trained to be sensitive and avoid human prejudices such as hateful, racist, sexual, and toxic behaviour.
This year's Google I/O looks to be very interesting. It is expected to be hosted at Shoreline Amphitheatre, near the company's HQ usually around the May-June period.
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