Google is taking the advent of ChatGPT very seriously

Despite the apparent tranquility and caution shown in recent days, internally Google is on red alert in relation to ChatGPT, the conversational AI software that is being portrayed as the future of search engines. According to New York Timesthe managing director Sundar Pichai would have ordered the suspension of the current projects of various teams to reassign them to the development of a product capable of competing with ChatGPT – which, we recall, is currently still in the prototype phase – but not only.

The source explains that between now and Google I/O 2023 (which should be held as usual around the month of May), groups of employees from the research and security divisions will lend a hand to the AI ​​branch in the development of “prototypes and products ” based on machine learning: among these there will be also software/services that generate images from descriptions, a bit like DALL-E 2 (always created by whoever developed ChatGPT, or OpenAI). It is worth noting that some of them have already been shown before, and should be offered for public testing soon.

We recall that Google has been working for some time on a service more or less similar to ChatGPT – or rather, on a technology capable of holding a conversation with human beings by taking information from the internet. Is called The MDA. Just a few days ago, Pichai himself said during a plenary meeting with all employees that for a company the size of Google, the image damage in the event of errors or inaccuracies in the answers could be much more serious than for a startup like OpenAI.

But for Google, whose fortune largely depends on its search engine’s ability to provide accurate and reliable results (and on the advertisements it can place at the same time), a service like ChatGPT can pose an extremely serious threat. It’s more or less easy to guess how Google has all the ingredients in hand to be successful in this field – the search, Assistant itself, LaMDA; he just has to find the right recipe. But now that there’s a serious competitor causing discussion, the feeling is that the matter has suddenly become much more urgent.