The internet search behemoth Google and I were born within a few months of each other, and then separated by a few years.
This month, Google will celebrate its 25th birthday (I’ll have a few extra candles on my cake), and the company finds its way through a technology world that has undergone significant transformation since its founders, Larry Page as well as Sergey Brin, established it in 1998.
In those days, Google was nothing more than a simple search engine, but it spent the first few months of existence in the backyard of Susan Wojcicki, who would later become the CEO of YouTube.
You do not require me to inform you of the success that was achieved by using that search engine. 17 years have passed since the word “Google” was first included in print editions of dictionaries.
I recall a conversation taking place on BBC about whether or not we ought to employ it as a word on-air due to the fact that it has a chance to become a free advertisement for the company.
Since then, that business, which is now a subsidiary of a bigger parent organization known as Alphabet, has diversified into virtually every sector of the technology industry and dominates certain of those sectors to an extent that sometimes causes anti-trust regulators concern.
It is currently attempting to Google its own into first place in the AI race, despite the fact that some people believe it is far behind.
Misses and Hits
Google is responsible for the creation of hundreds of products and services, including e-mail and software,hardware and smartphones, autonomous cars, digital assistants, and YouTube, among other things. There have been several failures among them.
On the site called Killed by Google, there’s a list of 288 projects that have been discontinued. These projects include the gaming system Stadia and the inexpensive VR gear Google Cardboard.
The question that has to be answered right now is whether or not Google will be able to keep its omniscience in the world of rapidly advancing artificial intelligence.
There have been rumors, some of which have originated from within the organization, that it was left behind. A Google engineer said in a document that was published online that the company did not own any “secret sauce” about artificial intelligence and that they were not in the running to win the race.
This sensation was amplified even further by the conflict among the bots.
The first time that many people knowingly engaged with artificial intelligence (AI) – and were taken aback by it – occurred in the shape of ChatGPT, a wildly popular AI chatbot that blasted into the globe in November 2022.
OpenAI, the company that developed it, has received investments of billions of dollars from Microsoft, which has begun integrating it into its own line of products, such as Bing, its search engine, and Office 365. OpenAI was created by Microsoft.
ChatGPT has been termed the “killer of Google” due to the fact that it may provide a response to a question in a single go, as opposed to delivering pages upon pages of results from searches.
It used a language-processing architecture known as a transformer, which was really designed by Google. However, when Google came up a few months afterward with its own competitor Bard, it did not have quite the same impact as Transformer.
Unexpectedly, the rollout of Bard was quite conservative. The internet giant insisted that it was not for users under the age of 18, and a top executive termed it “an experiment” while speaking to me about it.
It’s possible that anything strange that happened before Bard contributed, at least in part, to the creature’s wariness.
Sentient Discussions
A Large Language Approach, often known as an LLM, serves as the basis for a chatbot. Lamda was the name of one of the early LLMs developed by Google.
One of the engineers who experimented on it came to the conclusion that it has sentience. He uploaded hundreds and pages of exchanges, all of which he said proved his argument, demonstrating that Lamda was expressing genuine feelings and thoughts.
Naturally, this is the specific task that an LLM is taught to complete, which is to generate content that appears to have been written by real people. Lamda has been the subject of persistent denials from Google, which has ultimately led to the employee being let go from the company.
However, it made headlines all around the world and increased people’s anxiety about AI prior to the discussion becoming current. Perhaps Google was hoping not to have been a part of those headlines, as it contributed to the anxiety about AI.
It is safe to say that the company has not given up. Google made the announcement in May at its annual IO developer conference, which included 25 fresh AI-driven services. It asserts on its website that it is “at the cutting edge of pushing the frontiers of AI” in a statement that may be seen there. It is the owner of the premier artificial intelligence company in the United Kingdom, DeepMind, whose AI tool AlphaFold offers the potential to accelerate the development of novel drugs.
Chirag Dekate, an analyst at Gartner, went to the futurist event Google Next in August. According to him, the program was focused entirely on artificial intelligence (AI).
According to him, Google is preparing itself to take the lead in the burgeoning economy of generative AI.