GoogleBard’s announcement last week was meant to show the company has similar technology to the popular chatbot ChatGPT, although it still has a long way to go before it’s ready for product, Alphabet Chairman John Hennessy said Monday.
“I think Google was hesitant to produce this because they didn’t think it was really ready for a product yet, but I think as a demonstration vehicle it’s a great piece of technology,” said Hennessy, who served as chairman of the parent company of Google since 2018. He also said that he thinks generative AI is still one to two years away from becoming a truly useful tool for the general public.
Hennessy was speaking at a summit hosted by venture firm Celesta Capital in Mountain View, California. Hennessey has a long history in technology, including as a professor, researcher and company founder, and also served as president of Stanford University from 2000 to 2016.
Hennessy, who talked about key trends for 2023, briefly touched on Google, which has been caught up in the sudden surge of interest in ChatGPT and generative AI.
Last week, the company launched its answer to ChatGPT in a conversational technology it calls Bard. However, the announcement seemed rushed to coincide with Microsoft’s inclusion of ChatGPT technology in its Bing search engine, and investors punished Alphabet shares, sending them down 9% on the day.
Hennessy said Google has been slow to launch its rival ChatGPT in part because it still gives the wrong answers. Google is among the most used consumer products, and organizations like YouTube and Search have sometimes provided inaccurate information in the past.
That past seems to instill caution in the company.
“You don’t want to launch a system that either says the wrong thing or sometimes says toxic things,” Hennessy said on the conference call, echoing CEO Sundar Pichai’s response in December when employees asked if the company was lagging behind ChatGPT. The tech industry needs to be “a little more careful about the situation we’re creating in civil society,” he acknowledged.
“I think these models are still in the early stages — we’re figuring out how to bring them into the product stream and do it in a way that’s sensitive to correctness as well as issues like toxicity,” Hennessy told CNBC on Monday. “I think the industry is struggling with that.”
He added, “I don’t think Vint expected that people would use the Internet to do evil things,” referring to Google CEO Vint Cerf, who was one of the early developers of the Internet’s underlying technology.
“I’m from an era where if you spammed someone, you were a social pariah. Now I get 10 spam messages for every genuine message, so the world has changed and we have to think about the role of technology in making sure that we have a functioning democracy, we have people who can live together and work together, we don’t have hatred or some of the these other toxic things. I think we really need to work on that.”
Hennessey added that he was impressed with ChatGPT’s capabilities and that it moved faster than he expected.
“I’m impressed by two things—first, the quality of natural language’s ability to interpret a query, but also to respond to something—the generative function. I’m impressed that it manages, at least on a fairly superficial level, to get a lot of things right.”
He declined to comment specifically on the public reaction to Google Bard’s announcement last week.
Hennessy later said it’s a good time for Silicon Valley startups that could benefit from recruiting Big Tech talent during the current layoff cycle.
“Startups play such an important role in the Valley,” he said. “One of the great things about the Valley is that you can’t rest on your laurels because some new startup will come along and really give you a run for your money. ”
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