Apparently, the hype surrounding ChatGPT caught Google on the wrong foot. CEO Sundar Pichai issued a “red alert” and brought the company founders on board as consultants, reports the New York Times, citing business circles. Accordingly, Larry Page and Sergey Brin have reviewed the company’s AI strategy and proposed further AI functions for the search engine.
Google plans to introduce more than 20 new products this year, as well as a variant of the search engine with a chatbot. In the past few days, Google has apparently made an effort to highlight its work with artificial intelligence (AI). Several Posts in Google’s blog deal with the topic and give an overview of Google’s AI activities.
DeepMind “Sparrow”
The fact that Google’s management now wants to increase the number of hits should also affect the subsidiary DeepMind. The company, which specializes in AI, is developing a chatbot comparable to ChatGPT called “Sparrow”. While DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis recently promised US media a limited beta test for this year, Google could now push to deliver faster results.
Page and Brin, who developed Google’s search engine together, withdrew from active management of the company, which has since grown into the Alphabet Group, at the end of 2019. The fact that Pichai is now reactivating them in order to advance Google in artificial intelligence shows how urgently the company apparently wants to recapture territory it had thought to be lost.
ChatGPT is an AI chatbot that responds to text instructions and aims to answer them as naturally as possible. The chatbot can write texts, but also poems in the style of others or write program code. The chatbot developed by OpenAI is open to all interested parties for testing purposes and has triggered a real hype in recent weeks.
Microsoft invests in ChatGPT
The fact that Google now wants to accelerate its own AI strategy is probably also due to the fact that its major competitor Microsoft is not only heavily involved financially in OpenAI. In 2019, the group had invested one billion US dollars in OpenAI. According to media reports, Microsoft is currently planning to put another 10 billion into the company and increase its stake to 49 percent.
Meanwhile, Google parent Alphabet has announced that thousands of jobs will be cut. Around 12,000 jobs are to be lost worldwide, as Pichai explained in a statement. This corresponds to around six percent of the workforce. Pichai indicated that the core business will be strengthened and other activities will be scaled back. AI is now apparently one of the top priorities in the group. Other tech giants such as Microsoft and Amazon had previously cut thousands of jobs.
(vbr)