My all-time saying in this land of post-modernistic devices has been:

Live by the demo. Die by the demo.
– William Lee Mapp, III

“Toss a coin to your Google, Oh valley of plenty, oh valley plenty…”

Because Google’s stock price tumbled 8% after Bard goofed on its response.”

To much fanfare, Google announced, Bard, it’s AI answer-and-response competitor to ChatGPT.

Bard is built on Google’s existing language model, Lamda, which was over-hyped in the press because a Google engineer went on the record and claimed it was sentient. (It’s not. We dissected this on First News on 570, and lambasted this on The Cloud.)

Everyone’s in a rush to integrate AI into more stuff, and rushing out their chatbots. Google has announced new AI tools that integrate with Google search products. Like other AIs, Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, wants it to be bold and responsible and not be harmful and abusive. The Do No Evil company has a lot to work up with in that regard, because it hasn’t been behaving on the up and up in the last several quarters.

Google says Bard will operate using a lightweight version of Lamda instead of the one previously reported. This will allow more people to use the system at once. Chatbots using a full AI require lots of computing power and many users can tax the system operating at once. During my use of OpenAI’s products, latency has become a bigger deal as more people catch on to using the technology.

We are going to be in a full-on AI arms race. Microsoft has announced plans to invest billions of dollars into OpenAI so it can integrate ChatGPT into its Bing search product. (People still use Bing?) And Google has rushed Bard out hopping to capitalize on all the hype surrounding the technology.

Thing is, rushing out a technology like this may not be the best policy. We’ve made fun of some of ChatGPT’s responses, but Bard just plainly got it wrong during Google’s demo of the tech. When asked about the latest new discoveries from the James Web Telescope, Bard responded with a canned greeting. It’s like Bard wasn’t even listening.

Stay tuned for more in the world of AI.

If you’d like to read more about Lamda and how AI isn’t sentient you can read it here on theSync. If you’d like to hear some expert opinion on this, you can check it out on Episode 2 of The Cloud.