Google asks Larry Page and Sergey Brin for help in AI battle

Over the past month, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, held several meetings with company executives. The topic: a competitor’s new chatbot, a clever AI product that looked like it could be the first notable threat to Google’s $149 billion in decades looking for business.

Mr. Page and Mr. Brin, who hadn’t spent much time at Google since leaving their day-to-day duties at the company in 2019, reviewed Google’s artificial intelligence product strategy, according to two people with knowledge of the meetings who weren’t allowed to discuss them. They approved plans and suggested ideas to add more chatbot features to Google’s search engine. And they offered advice to business leaders who have placed AI at the heart of their plans.

The renewed engagement of the Google founders, at the invitation of the company’s current CEO, Sundar Pichai, underscored the urgency many Google executives feel towards artificial intelligence and this chatbot, ChatGPT.

The bot, released two months ago by the small San Francisco-based company OpenAI, amazed users by simply explaining complex concepts and generating ideas from scratch. More importantly for Google, it looked like it could offer a new way to search for information on the web.

The new AI technology has upset Google from its routine. Mr. Pichai declared a “code red”, turn existing plans upside down and kickstart AI development. Google now intends to unveil more than 20 new products this year and to demonstrate a version of its search engine with chatbot capabilities, according to a slide presentation reviewed by The New York Times and two people with knowledge of the plans who weren’t authorized to discuss them .

At the same time, Alphabet is reducing its workforce. On Friday, said the company It would cut about 12,000 jobs after a hiring frenzy during the pandemic and amid concerns about a slowing economy. The layoffs were designed “to ensure our people and roles are aligned with our highest priorities as a company,” Mr Pichai wrote in a note to employees.

“This is a moment of significant vulnerability for Google,” said D. Sivakumar, a former research director at Google who helped found a startup called Tonita that makes search technology for e-commerce companies. “ChatGPT put a stake in the ground and said, ‘This could be a compelling new search experience.'” Mr Sivakumar added that Google has overcome previous challenges and can use its arsenal of AI to stay competitive.

Since withdrawal from day-to-day business, Mr. Page and Mr. Brin have taken a laissez-faire approach to Google, two people familiar with the matter said. They’ve let Mr. Pichai run the company and its parent company Alphabet while pursuing other projects like flying car startups and disaster relief.

Their visits to the company’s Silicon Valley offices over the past few years were primarily to review so-called moonshot projects, which Alphabet calls “other bets,” one person said. Until recently, they didn’t bother much with the search engine.

But they’ve long been interested in bringing AI into Google’s products. Vic Gundotra, a former senior vice president at Google, said he demonstrated a new Gmail feature to Mr. Page around 2008. However, Mr Page was unfazed by the effort and asked, “Why can’t it auto-write this email? to you?” In 2014, Google also acquired DeepMind, a leading AI research lab based in London.

Google’s Advanced Technology Review Council, a panel of executives that includes Jeff Dean, the company’s senior vice president of research and artificial intelligence, and Kent Walker, Google’s president of global affairs and chief legal officer, met less than two weeks after the ChatGPT debuts to discuss their company’s initiatives as per the slide presentation.

They reviewed plans for products expected to be unveiled at Google’s corporate conference in May, including Image Generation Studio, which creates and edits images, and a third version of AI Test Kitchen, an experimental app for testing product prototypes.

Other image and video projects in the works included a feature called Shopping Try-on, a YouTube green screen feature for creating backgrounds; a wallpaper maker for the Pixel smartphone; an application called Maya that visualizes three-dimensional shoes; and a tool that could summarize videos by generating a new one according to the slides.

Google has a list of AI programs it plans to offer software developers and other companies, including imaging technology, that could boost revenue for Google’s cloud division. There are also tools to help other companies create their own AI prototypes in internet browsers, called MakerSuite, which the presentation says will have two “Pro” versions.

In May, Google also plans to announce a tool called Colab + Android Studio, which aims to make it easier to create apps for Android smartphones and which, according to the presentation, will generate, complete and fix code. Another code generation and completion tool called PaLM-Coder 2 is also in the works.

Google executives hope to reclaim their company’s status as an AI pioneer. The company has been aggressively working on AI for the past decade and has already offered a small number of people a chatbot called LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, that could rival ChatGPT.

“We continue to test our AI technology internally to ensure it’s helpful and safe, and we look forward to sharing more experiences externally soon,” said Lily Lin, a spokeswoman for Google, in a statement. She added that AI would benefit individuals, businesses and communities, and that Google is considering the broader societal impact of the technology.

Google, OpenAI, and others design their AI using so-called big language models that rely on online information, so they can sometimes share false statements and show racist, sexist, and other depictions biased attitudes.

That had been enough to make companies wary of offering the technology to the public. But several new companies, including You.com and Perplexity.ai, are already offering online search engines that let you ask questions through an online chatbot, similar to ChatGPT. According to a , Microsoft is also working on a new version of its Bing search engine that would incorporate similar technology report from The Information.

According to the presentation reviewed by The Times, Mr. Pichai has attempted to expedite the product approval review. The company set up an expedited vetting process called the “Green Lane” initiative and urged groups of employees trying to ensure it Technology is fair and ethical to approve its upcoming AI technology faster.

The company will also find ways for teams developing AI to conduct their own reviews, and it will “recalibrate” the level of risk it’s willing to take when releasing the technology, according to the presentation.

The consequences of Google’s more streamlined approach are not yet foreseeable. According to analysis compiled by Google, its technology lags behind OpenAI’s self-reported metrics when it comes to identifying content that is hateful, toxic, sexual, or violent. In every category, OpenAI outperformed Google tools, which also fell short of human accuracy when evaluating content.

Google listed copyright, privacy, and antitrust law as the technology’s key risks in the slide presentation. To mitigate these risks, measures such as filtering responses to discard copyrighted material and preventing AI from sharing personal information are needed.

For the chatbot search demonstration Google is planning for this year, priorities are getting the facts right, ensuring safety, and eliminating misinformation. For other upcoming services and products, the company has a lower bar and will seek to contain rather than prevent issues related to hate and toxicity, danger and misinformation, the presentation said.

For example, the company intends to block certain words to avoid hate speech and will try to minimize other potential problems.

Google expects governments to scrutinize its AI products for signs of these issues. The company has recently been the subject of numerous regulatory investigations and lawsuits accuse him of anti-competitive business practices. According to the presentation, she anticipates “increased pressure on AI’s regulatory efforts due to increasing concerns about misinformation, harmful content, bias and copyright.”

Trip Mickle and Cade Metz contributed reporting.