(Mountain View) The Bard dialoguer open to the general public, online search made more direct and new tools for automated creation: Google inflates its products with generative artificial intelligence (capable of creating content on demand, in everyday language) , lagging behind rival Microsoft.
“We have been primarily an artificial intelligence (AI) company for seven years and we are at a turning point,” said Sundar Pichai, the Californian group’s boss, in front of thousands of people gathered in his amphitheater in Mountain View. .
He highlighted his company’s “bold and responsible” approach during the annual presentation of new products.
On the program, new electronic gadgets, including the first folding smart phone in its Pixel range, the Pixel Fold, which opens into a mini-tablet and will be marketed from 1800 dollars.
But Google was especially expected on the AI front.
The release in November of the ChatGPT interface — designed by California-based startup OpenAI, mostly funded by Microsoft — launched a race for generative AI, between exuberant enthusiasm and apocalyptic worries.
Google responded with its own interface, Bard, which opened to the public at the end of March. On Wednesday, the company announced that the chatbot is now available in English in 180 countries.
The dialoguer will soon be able to converse in 40 languages and must become multimedia, that is to say be able to integrate images into the questions of Internet users and into their answers.
Rivalry
The world leader in digital advertising also showed how online search will gradually change, with written answers to Internet users’ questions above the traditional links.
Users will also be able to exchange directly with the interface, to refine their request. The interface will highlight expert advice (specialized sites, blogs) or even links to stores for purchases.
The new Google should arrive in the coming weeks, the company has opened a waiting list on which you must register.
“Google’s expertise in understanding information, combined with generative AI, will once again transform search,” predicted Sundar Pichai.
The Internet giant is also developing Bard extensions, so that users can interact with the robot directly from the Maps mapping application, the Gmail mailbox or the Docs online word processor.
The customers of its cloud computing activity are not forgotten, with tools for companies that want to design their own generative AI-based tools (search, dialoguers, etc.) for their applications, with their own data.
Microsoft recently made similar announcements. The IT firm had already integrated ChatGPT into its Bing search engine and opened it up completely to the general public last week, thus relaunching this hitherto negligible portal compared to Google.
The two competitors compete with ads with a stated goal: that their platforms equipped with generative AI become the preferred personal assistants of users.
” Fascinating ”
Google presented PaLM 2 on Wednesday, the new, more advanced version of its language model, these algorithms trained on mountains of data which make it possible to create conversational robots like ChatGPT or Bard.
“It has allowed a lot of improvements in Bard over the past two months, in terms of math, logic, reasoning skills and even coding and correcting code,” said product manager Jack Krawczyk during a conference of press.
“We are at a fascinating time when the gap between human imagination and the capabilities of technology is rapidly closing,” he added.
But the prowess of Silicon Valley worries, especially since OpenAI launched in March GPT-4, a “great multimedia model […] perform as well as humans in many professional and academic contexts”.
The boss of the company, Sam Altman, explained that he is working towards so-called “general” artificial intelligence, that is to say programs with human cognitive abilities.
Many experts have since aired their fears, from misinformation to replacing jobs, going so far as to call for a six-month break from research.
Geoffrey Hinton, a former Google computer scientist considered one of the founding fathers of AI, said on May 3 that the “existential threat” that AI posed to humanity was “serious and close”, during a roundtable organized by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).