Alphabet Inc and Google chief executive officer Sundar Pichai said in an interview broadcast on Sunday that the push to adopt artificial intelligence (AI) technology must be well regulated to avoid potential harmful effects.
Asked in an interview on the US newsmagazine show 60 Minutes about what keeps him up at night with regard to AI, Pichai said “the urgency to work and deploy it in a beneficial way, but at the same time it can be very harmful if deployed wrongly.”
Mountain View, California-based Google has been among the leaders in developing and implementing AI across its services. Software such as Google Lens and Google Photos rely on the company’s image-recognition systems, while its Google Assistant benefits from natural language processing research that Google has been doing for years.
Photo: Reuters
Still, its pace of deploying the technology has been deliberately measured and circumspect, whereas OpenAI’s ChatGPT has opened up a race to move forward with AI tools at a much faster clip.
“We don’t have all the answers there yet, and the technology is moving fast,” Pichai said. “So does that keep me up at night? Absolutely.”
Google is playing catchup in looking to infuse its products with generative AI — software that can create text, images, music or even video based on user prompts. ChatGPT and another OpenAI product, Dall-E, showed the technology’s potential, and countless businesses from Silicon Valley to China’s Internet leaders are getting involved in presenting their own offerings.
Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt urged global tech companies to come together and develop standards and appropriate guardrails, warning that any slowdown in development would “simply benefit China.”
Despite the sense of urgency in the industry, Pichai cautioned against companies being swept up in the competitive dynamics, saying he found lessons in the experience of OpenAI’s more direct approach and debut of ChatGPT.
“One of the points they have made is, you don’t want to put out a tech like this when it’s very, very powerful because it gives society no time to adapt,” Pichai said. “I think that’s a reasonable perspective. I think there are responsible people there trying to figure out how to approach this technology, and so are we.”
Among the risks of generative AI that Pichai highlighted are so-called deepfake videos, in which a person can be portrayed uttering remarks that they did not say.
Such pitfalls illustrate the need for regulation, Pichai said.
“There have to be consequences for creating deepfake videos which cause harm to society,” he said. “Anybody who has worked with AI for a while, you know, you realize this is something so different and so deep that we would need societal regulations to think about how to adapt.”
Meanwhile, Microsoft Corp’s Bing might replace Google as the default search service on Samsung Electronics Co devices, a New York Times report said on Sunday.
Suwon-based Samsung, the world’s leading smartphone maker, is considering making the switch, putting at risk about US$3 billion in annual revenue for Google, the report said.
Bing’s threat to Google’s search dominance has grown more credible in the past few months with the addition of OpenAI’s technology to provide ChatGPT-like responses to user queries.
Samsung shipped 261 million smartphones last year, International Data Corp data showed, all running Google’s Android software.
The South Korean company has long-established partnerships with Microsoft and Google, and its devices come preloaded with a library of apps and services from both, such as OneDrive and Google Maps.
Negotiations are still ongoing and Samsung might yet decide to keep Google as its default provider, the report said.
Google is working on several projects to update and renew its search services to avoid losing ground.
Those include adding AI features to its existing offerings, under a project named Magi, which has more than 160 people working on it, the Times reported.
Google is “excited about bringing new AI-powered features to search and will share more details soon,” Lara Levin, a Google spokeswoman, said in a statement.
A Google representative did not comment on the company’s negotiations with Samsung. A representative from Samsung declined to comment.
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