The latest guest on the “60 Minutes” show on CBS is no other than Alphabet and Google chief executive officer Sundar Pichai. The CEO mostly talked about artificial intelligence, and how it can bring threats to jobs and become a spreader of fake news. Sounds fearful? Here’s the story.
AI would disrupt jobs, society must be prepared for it
Various artificial intelligence or AI tools have taken the world by storm. They include OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which can do unbelievable things from writing a Biblical verse explaining how to remove a peanut butter sandwich from a VCR; to accurately explaining a bug, fixing it, and explaining the fix in turn – and Google’s Bard, a chatbot that competes with the former.
Plus, according to the website Cloudwards, over 100 million people use ChatGPT as of February 2023.
With these things AI tools like such can perform, there is seemingly nothing people can do but brace for impact.
Pichai talked about Bard and what it can do, and said in the interview, “We need to adapt as a society.”
He went on to say that AI can disrupt jobs that include knowledge workers, such as accountants, writers, architects, and even software engineers.
The CEO said it will “impact every product across every company,” adding, “For example, you could be a radiologist, if you think about five to 10 years from now, you’re going to have an AI collaborator with you. You come in the morning, let’s say you have a hundred things to go through, it may say, ‘these are the most serious cases you need to look at first’.”
Threat to information
Aside from taking over jobs, Pichai also discussed how AI can scale up the problem with disinformation and fake news, believing this “could cause harm.”
Last month, Google launched its Bard chatbot to the public after Microsoft’s announcement in January that its search engine Bing would incorporate OpenAI’s GPT technology, which, meanwhile, launched in 2022.
Even the world’s top tech CEOs, like Elon Musk, have expressed concerns over these AI’s consequences.
Pause AI
Just last March, Musk, along with Steve Wozniak and various academics, called for an immediate pause in training “experiments” related to large language models that were “more powerful than GPT-4.” Since then, more than 25,000 people have signed the letter.
“Competitive pressure among giants like Google and startups you’ve never heard of is propelling humanity into the future, ready or not,” the show’s host, Scott Pelley, commented in the segment.
The plot thickens
However, also last month, Pichai reportedly spoke with employees that things with Bard can “go wrong.”
Pelley seconded this, saying that there was an instance he asked Bard, and it suggested books about inflation that do not exist. The Alphabet CEO responded by saying Bard would have a lot of hallucinations, adding, “there is a black box with chatbots, where you don’t fully understand why or how it comes up with certain responses.”
Pichai was then asked about why, without complete understanding, they would build such a chatbot, and said humans yet do not understand how their minds work.
Meanwhile, in other company news, shares of Alphabet slid during early morning trading after The New York Times reported Samsung is looking at using Microsoft’s Bing as its devices’ default search engine, given its recent advancements with its AI technology, and to replace Google.
The report also said the Google parent learned about those discussions in March and that approximately $3 billion in annual revenue is at stake.
