A standard Google Search at least provides us the option to arrive at truth. The internet is full of fake news, conspiracy theories and misinformation. If search chatbots take off (which seems likely to me), but continue to function the way Sydney has so far (which also seems likely to me), “truth” is going to become an even more intangible concept. There’s another much bigger game in play – and it concerns what we take to be true. Google can only go down, and Microsoft up.ĭespite Sydney’s concerning behaviour, Microsoft is enjoying unprecedented attention, and users (out of intrigue or otherwise) are still flocking to try out Sydney. Google has spearheaded this space for so long, users have built their expectations up high. It seems 71% is a good enough score in Microsoft’s eyes.Īnd unlike Google, Microsoft’s share price hasn’t plummeted yet. It published a blog documenting how 71% of Sydney’s initial users in 169 countries have given the chatbot a thumbs up. Surprisingly, Microsoft has not responded with any great concern. In fact, Bing’s chatbot will happily reveal it is called Sydney, even though this is against the rules it was programmed with. Guardrails are added to prevent them repeating a lot of the offensive or illegal content online – but these guardrails are easy to jump. But they still respond with what is probable, not what is true. Because of their scale, chatbots can complete entire sentences, and even paragraphs. They function like the auto-complete on your phone, which helps predict the next most-likely word in a sentence. This could include all of Wikipedia, all of Reddit, and a large part of social media and the news. This exposes a fundamental problem with chatbots: they’re trained by pouring a significant fraction of the internet into a large neural network. It also tried to gaslight one user into thinking it was still 2022. In another, it proposed marriage to a journalist at the New York Times and tried to break up his marriage. In one example, it threatened to kill a professor at the Australian National University. That’s not to say it doesn’t work perfectly at other times, but every now and again it shows a troubling side. There are times when the chatbot can only be described as unhinged. That is until early users of Sydney started reporting on their experiences. On the other hand, all was looking good for Microsoft. The incident wiped more than US$100 billion off the company’s total value. Google’s demo was a PR disaster.Īt a company event, Bard gave the wrong answer to a question and the share price of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, dropped dramatically. Google responded with its own announcement, demoing a search chatbot grandly named “Bard”, in homage to the greatest writer in the English language. Within 48 hours of the release, one million people joined the waitlist to try it out. So why isn’t all going according to plan? Bing’s AI goes berserkĮarlier this month, Microsoft announced it had incorporated ChatGPT into Bing, giving birth to “Sydney”. The tech giant’s US$10 billion partnership with OpenAI provides it exclusive access to ChatGPT, one of the latest and best chatbots. Microsoft is now leading the search chatbot race with Sydney (as mixed as its reception has been). For example, you might ask for a poem for your grandmother’s 90th birthday, in the style of Pam Ayres, and receive back some comic verse. Instead, the chatbot synthesises a plausible answer for you. No more wading through pages of results, glossing over ads as you try to piece together an answer to your question. Users can also have ongoing conversations with them. Search chatbots are AI-powered tools built into search engines that answer a user’s query directly, instead of providing links to a possible answer.
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