Why every tech firm wants an AI-powered chatbot

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Summary

The battle for AI-powered chatbots is heating up with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella all trying to outpace each other in the race to develop more powerful generative artificial intelligence (AI) apps and chatbots

The battle for AI-powered chatbots is heating up with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Satya Nadella all trying to outpace each other in the race to develop more powerful generative artificial intelligence (AI) apps and chatbots. Here’s what’s at stake:

How transformative is generative AI?

Generative AI can help businesses create content more efficiently and faster by generating headline suggestions, blogs, images, captions, product descriptions, reviews, ads, code generation, and even templates for marketing campaigns and ideas to augment artistic creativity. Shopify’s Magic tool, for instance, can generate product descriptions from a list of keywords, in tones that merchants choose. Generative AI can also analyse data from clinical trials and other sources, accelerating new drug development. In retail, Carrefour is experimenting with ChatGPT to make videos to answer customers’ questions.

How is Big Tech upping the stakes?

Microsoft is not only funding OpenAI but also made its AI-powered Bing available on its Edge browser, Skype, and also as a typeable Windows search box in the taskbar. Google’s conversational AI service, called Bard, is powered by its Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) but the company is yet to integrate Bard with Google Search. Meta (formerly known as Facebook) had to shut down two of its AI chatbots called BlenderBot and Galatica due to glitches but has now released a Large Language Model Meta AI (LLaMA) and publicly shared the code for researchers to test it.

What’s Musk doing in the generative AI race?

Elon Musk, who co-founded OpenAI along with Sam Altman in 2015, left its board in 2018 but is reportedly setting up a team to develop an AI-powered chatbot called ‘BasedAI’. Musk is wary of Microsoft’s investment in OpenAI and has accused it of “pushing for profits" instead of developing AI for human good.

This is tech: what are the pitfalls?

AI-powered chatbots continue to ‘hallucinate’, meaning they can provide convincing yet untrue or inaccurate statements. They are prone to plagiarizing text and ideas that can violate intellectual property (IP). Using chatbots mindlessly can rewire the brain and make us, humans, outsource our thinking abilities to machines. Racial bias, toxic content and inaccuracies can cost companies. Google lost over $100 billion in mcap after Bard shared inaccurate data about the James Webb space telescope.

How to avoid the dark side of generative AI?

Recommendations to ban AI-generated content are retrograde steps, given its benefits. That said, policy makers have to build frameworks to regulate tech companies on the use of the copious amounts of data that is being fed to these models daily. Smart chatbots must reveal their sources and give credit to the original authors. Humans ought to moderate the output of such chatbots for inaccuracies, toxic content and racial bias, which is easier said than done since it increases the cost for companies.

 

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