It generates human-like responses to natural language inputs, making it a powerful tool for conversational artificial intelligence applications, including language translation, text summarisation, question answering, and even creative writing by analysing vast amounts of text data and learning patterns in language use, which it can then use to generate coherent and contextually appropriate responses, as per the user inputs.

OpenAI’s success has invited rivalry from other tech giants like Google, Amazon, Meta, Baidu and Tencent. However, Google’s Bard’s launch was unsuccessful, and ever since Microsoft bought OpenAI and integrated ChatGPT technology into Bing, Chrome has been suffering, and tech analysts and investors are wary about the popular search engine’s future.

Despite the red tape, Chinese companies continue to innovate and have released their AI much before American tech giants like Amazon and Meta.

Leading Chinese search engine Baidu has unveiled Ernie, a chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to compete with ChatGPT.

What Are Ernie’s Capabilities?

At a live-streamed news conference organised to demonstrate the capabilities of the technology on April 13, Baidu Chief Executive Robin Li stated that Ernie (Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration), known as Weixin in Chinese, was the outcome of “decades of Baidu’s hard work and efforts.”

Li demonstrated Ernie creating a conference poster and video based on a prompt at the Beijing event and recommending the finest Chinese city for the event’s location and reading material in the Sichuan dialect.

The CEO also demonstrated the chatbot answering queries and outlining the plot of a well-known Chinese science fiction novel.

The functionalities, which will be incorporated into Baidu’s Xiaodu intelligent device ecosystem, would initially only be accessible to a select group of individuals with an Ernie invitation code, according to Li.

Li claimed that although the bot can recognise something incorrect, it struggles with inquiries involving logical mistakes and performs better in Chinese than in English.

In contrast to OpenAI’s live demonstrations of ChatGPT, Ernie’s capabilities were shown by Baidu through a series of slides. Additionally, the chatbot lacks features like the capacity to produce text in response to a picture revealed in the follow-up to Chat GPT, GPT-4.

Investors did not react favourably to Ernie’s launch, and Baidu’s Hong Kong-listed shares dropped more than 10% during the pre-recorded demonstration.

“There is still a lot of uncertainty around Ernie’s capacity, especially given the lack of a live demo – a stark contrast to OpenAI’s GPT-4’s developer livestream a few days ago,” said Chim Lee, a China technology expert for the Economist Intelligence Unit.

Obstacles To Growth

China is becoming increasingly Orwellian with surveillance cameras everywhere, state internet control, and a social credit system. Analysts wonder how artificial intelligence can develop in such a controlled environment and whether it will have relevant access to information.

However, it is believed that the restrictions placed on foreign AI will not cripple the advancements of state-compliant domestic players. As a result, the artificial intelligence sector from the world’s second-largest economy might still need to compete with global giants, but it can undoubtedly dominate and even monopolise billion-dollar domestic markets.

Baidu investors were disappointed that Ernie’s capabilities were presented on a slideshow instead of a live stream launch. It has even made people question the fundamentals and authenticity of the project.

But despite the backlash, the Chinese are determined to create AI that serves the Chinese ecosystem. Li said more than 650 Chinese institutions, including the National Museum of China, the Global Times newspaper, and China CITIC Bank, plan to employ Ernie.

The Chinese government has promised to assist regional AI creators and implement the technology throughout Chinese business. As a result, the local tech behemoths JD.com, Alibaba, and Huawei have planned to release their chatbots. Alibaba has even invited businesses to test its Tongyi Qianwen AI chatbot, as per media reports.

AI & Communist China

Given its authoritarian political system and strict control over information and technology, the Chinese government could use AI to crack down on its own citizens. Here are a few possibilities:

Social Credit System: China is already implementing a social credit system, which uses artificial intelligence and other technologies to monitor citizens’ behaviour and assign them scores based on their compliance with laws, regulations, and social norms. Those with low scores can face various penalties, including restrictions on travel, access to education, and employment opportunities.

Surveillance & Monitoring: China already has one of the most extensive surveillance systems in the world, with millions of cameras and other monitoring devices deployed in public spaces. Artificial intelligence could automate the monitoring and analysis of this data, allowing the government to identify and track individuals based on their behaviour and activities.

Predictive Policing: Artificial intelligence could be used to analyse data on crime and other activities to identify individuals who have been deemed a potential threat to the state, allowing the government to take preemptive action against them.

Propaganda & Censorship: Artificial intelligence could be used to generate and disseminate propaganda and disinformation and censor and control access to information on the internet.

The CCP welcomes the new technology and has even discussed AI’s potential in asymmetric cyber warfare. Whether to control or administrate the civilian population, cyber warfare, or give the domestic economy an edge, China knows that Artificial intelligence holds the key to its envisioned future.

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ChatGPT, launched at fag end of 2022, has been dominating the headlines for the past two months. Microsoft’s rival Google was caught off guard by the OpenAI product launch. It has now come up with its own version of the AI chatting tool ‘Bard’.

However, it hit a roadblock after giving incorrect answers about James Webb Space Telescope and this incident resulted in a bloodbath for the Sundar Pichai-led company in the share markets.

Following its release in November 2022, ChatGPT has gained popularity for producing a wide range of legitimate content, including academic essays, poems, and job applications. It also cleared the Minnesota University Law School exam in January 2023, along with the Wharton MBA exam, and the US law and medical licensing tests.

Not only that, over one million people have joined the waitlist to test out the new Bing Search with ChatGPT capabilities, according to Microsoft.

The new Bing, available to some users in a limited preview, was unveiled by Microsoft in February 2023.

Doubts have been raised among academics on whether the chatbot will be used in an unfair manner by the students to clear-write exams and assignments. In response, OpenAI has come up with ‘ZeroGPT’, which will help users to detect whether the text has been written by an AI programme and passed off as human-written, or it was actually written by a person.

ChatGPT surpassed Bitcoin among popular search terms, according to the Google Trends report for January 2023. The San Francisco–based startup—with 375 employees now has a reported valuation of roughly USD 30 billion.

While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has been the company’s face in media, the real brain who is leading the tech firm’s AI game is the 35-year-old Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati.

Who is Mira Murati?
• 35-year-old Mira Murati was born and brought up in San Francisco
• She did her Bachelor of Engineering from the Thayer School of Engineering at Dartmouth College in the United States
• Mira Murati started her career as a Summer Analyst at Goldman Sachs and was the senior product manager of Model X at Tesla from 2013 to 2016
• She joined OpenAI in June 2018 as Vice-President of applied Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Partnerships. From there, she became the senior vice-president of research and product.
• In May 2022, Mira Murati took over as the California-based tech firm’s Chief Technology Officer and led the ChatGPT development.
• Mira Murati has led the team which came out with DALL-E, a project which enables users to create realistic art from strings of text
• Googling Mira Murati’s name won’t show anyone a Wikipedia profile on the 35-year-old, while on Twitter, she has close to 64,000 followers and the last post from that handle came on February 17, 2023, where the 35-year-old shared a link of an OpenAI article titled ‘How should AI systems behave, and who should decide?’
• During an interview, Mira Murati said that the song she feels identified with is Radiohead’s ‘Paranoid Android’ and her favourite book and movie are ‘Duino Elegies’ and ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ respectively
• As per ‘Biography Reader’, Mira Murati’s hobbies include reading fiction, playing the piano, making chocolate and dancing salsa
• Mira Murati is Albanian with Indian lineage and speaks English, Italian and Albanian

Mira Murati’s point of view on ChatGPT and AI’s future

During an interview with Time Magazine, Mira Murati commented on ChatGPT clearing exams, “We weren’t anticipating this level of excitement from putting our child in the world. We, in fact, even had some trepidation about putting it out there. I’m curious to see the areas where it’ll start generating utility for people and not just novelty and pure curiosity.”

Talking about the chatbot’s current capabilities, she said, “Right now, it’s in the research review stage, so I don’t want to speak with high confidence on what problems it is solving. But I think that we can see that it has the potential to really revolutionize the way we learn. People are in classrooms of, say, 30 people. Everyone has different backgrounds, ways of learning, and everyone is getting basically the same curriculum. With tools like ChatGPT, you can endlessly converse with a model to understand a concept in a way that is catered to your level of understanding. It has immense potential to help us with personalized education.”

“[AI] can be misused, or it can be used by bad actors. So, then there are questions about how you govern the use of this technology globally. How do you govern the use of AI in a way that’s aligned with human values? It’s important for OpenAI and companies like ours to bring this into the public consciousness in a way that’s controlled and responsible. But we’re a small group of people and we need a ton more input in this system and a lot more input that goes beyond the technologies-—definitely regulators and governments and everyone else,” she elaborated, while speaking on the need for regulating the world of AI.

Image Credit: The Daily Show YouTube

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Vint Cerf cautioned against rushing to invest in conversational AI merely because “it’s a hot topic.” The warning comes as ChatGPT is experiencing a surge in popularity and Google is trying to take on the Microsoft-backed tech startup OpenAI with its Bard.

“There’s an ethical issue here that I hope some of you will consider,” he commented on Google’s Bard conversational AI.

“Everybody’s talking about ChatGPT or Google’s version of that, and we know it doesn’t always work the way we would like it to,” he said.

His caution comes amid tech firms’ struggle with maintaining competition in foolproof conversational AI.

John Hennessy, the chairman of Alphabet, stated that the systems are still far from being widely used and that several problems with “toxicity” and inaccuracy need to be fixed before the product is even tested on the general population.

Since 2005, Vint Cerf has worked for Google as a vice president and “chief internet evangelist”. As he collaborated on some of the architecture used to lay the internet’s groundwork, he is regarded as one of its “fathers.”

Although the technology is “really cool, even though it doesn’t work quite right all the time,” Vint Cerf advised against giving in to the desire to invest.

Vint Cerf remarked, “Man, I can sell this to investors because it’s a hot topic, and everyone will throw money at me.”

“Think carefully. You were correct in saying that we can’t always foresee what would happen with these technologies, but to be completely honest, the majority of the issue is people, which is why we as a species haven’t changed much over the past 400 years, much less the past 4,000,” he added further.

Vint Cerf stated, “They will seek to do that which is to their benefit and not yours. So, we must keep it in mind and exercise caution when utilising these technologies.”

According to him, there needs to be more clarity between what technology claims it can do and what it achieves.

“That’s the issue. You can’t tell the difference between an accurate and elegantly delivered response,” he said.

Vint Cerf gave an example when he asked a chatbot to provide him with a biography. He claimed that even though the bot’s response was inaccurate, it was presented as fact.

According to him, engineers like him should be in charge of attempting to discover a mechanism to control some of these technologies so that they are less likely to be harmful.

“A poor piece of fiction is one thing, depending on the application, of course. Offering someone advice can have medical repercussions. So it’s crucial to determine how to reduce the worst-case scenario,” he said.

Meanwhile, talking about the AI race, Google, which had a rocky start with its chatbot Bard in February 2023, is now implementing new methods to improve the chatbot’s efficiency.

As per Business Insider, the tech giant has already started companywide testing of Bard, with CEO Sundar Pichai asking his employees to spend two to four hours daily helping to test the chatbot before it gets integrated into Google search.

Google has started ‘dogfooding’ (testing by staff before it’s made publicly available) Bard since February 14, 2023. The chatbot reportedly has thousands of internal and external testers using it and submitting feedback.

After Bard’s launch, Google suffered a major reputational disaster as the chatbot offered incorrect responses to a question on the James Webb Space Telescope. This led to the search giant’s stock plummeting over 9%.

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The Verge (opens in new tab) has received information from the unnamed source indicating that Prometheus may soon be available in Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft Outlook.

This comes after the firm recently unveiled its redesigned Bing search engine, which some feel was unintentionally launched earlier than expected to beat Google’s Bard.

Microsoft Artificial Intelligence Tools
The Microsoft Outlook email service’s artificial intelligence model can handle more conversational cues and potentially make search more usable. The company’s mail app has long faced criticism for performing poorly in the search department, especially when compared to competitors like Gmail.

The advantages for Microsoft Word users might include some kind of writing support, such as better grammar and spelling checkers or more sophisticated tools to help create the proper tone. As a result, companies like Grammarly might need to accelerate their development.

Another artificial intelligence intended for Excel has already been proposed by certain Microsoft researchers from other parts of the suite. Despite not using the GPT model, the Excel-specific proprietary technology may aid less technically inclined users in producing better formulas.

Microsoft may seem to be releasing artificial intelligence versions in a hurried manner, but it has had more success than Google, which recently saw its market value decline significantly as a result of a Bard promo video that contained factually false material. Microsoft may have the resources it needs to become the preferred environment for both corporations and individuals again thanks to its relative success and speed.

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The company is also putting Bard’s technology into Google’s search engine to make it easier to find answers to complicated questions.

Bard has been made available to specialised product testers in the first week of February 2023, and in the coming days, it will be made available to everyone. Like ChatGPT, Bard is run by a “large language model,” in this case, LaMDA from Google.

LaMDA and ChatGPT are significant language artificial intelligence models that use neural networks and computer programmes to simulate the human brain’s internal structure. By giving them a lot of text from the internet, these chatbots are trained on how to write answers to text-based questions.

Following its release in November 2022, ChatGPT has gained popularity for producing a wide range of legitimate content, including academic essays, poems, and job applications. Analysts estimate that there are already 100 million users. It also cleared the Minnesota University Law School exam in January 2023, along with the Wharton MBA exam, and the US law and medical licensing tests.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has been vocal about Bard being as good as ChatGPT. Google’s information release on the chatbot included an example of Bard responding to a question about how to teach a nine-year-old about recent discoveries made by NASA’s James Webb space telescope and learning about the current top football strikers and receiving training routines to imitate elite players.

Sundar Pichai stated, “Bard seeks to combine the depth of the world’s knowledge with the strength, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models. It also uses data from the internet to deliver original, excellent responses.”

Google also said its search engine would incorporate the newest artificial intelligence technologies, including LaMDA, PaLM, the picture generator Imagen, and the music maker MusicLM.

Sundar Pichai also said that new artificial intelligence-powered search engine features would make complex data and different points of view easier to understand.

He gave the example of asking Google, “Which instrument is easier to learn, a guitar or a piano?”

Instead of providing a link to a single blog post, Google gave an example of a conversational answer to the question.

It reads, “Some claim the piano is easier to master, as the finger and hand movements are more natural, and learning and memorising notes can be more accessible.”

Others argue that learning guitar chords is more straightforward and that one may quickly master a strumming pattern.

To create apps utilising Google’s artificial intelligence technology, the company will also make the LaMDA technology available to developers, creators, and enterprises.

When a Google employee made public assertions that LaMDA was “sentient” in 2022, it quickly became a topic of discussion over the potential power of artificial intelligence. So, Google fired Blake Lemoine because they thought his claims about LaMDA, which stands for “language model for dialogue applications,” were “wholly unfounded.”

Google made its statement as Microsoft, a major supporter of ChatGPT, prepared to release other products utilising the chatbot’s technology. OpenAI, a San Francisco-based company that has secured a massive investment from Microsoft, created ChatGPT.

Users of Microsoft’s Bing search engine claimed to have seen a preview of a feature over the weekend that allowed them to ask queries up to 1,000 characters long with source citations in the answers.

In response to Google’s move, Microsoft is now revamping its Bing search engine and Edge web browser with artificial intelligence, in one of its biggest efforts to lead a new wave of technology and reshape how people gather information.

Microsoft is staking its future on artificial intelligence through billions of dollars of investment, while it challenges Google.

This rivalry may result in new competition in the field of cloud computing and collaboration products in 2023.

Working with OpenAI, Microsoft is now aiming to leapfrog Google and claim control over vast returns from tools that speed up content creation, automating tasks, if not jobs themselves.

“This technology is going to reshape pretty much every software category,” Microsoft Chief Executive Satya Nadella told reporters at company headquarters in Washington.

Investors are also expecting the artificial intelligence battle to create new markets. Shares of Microsoft rose 3.8% and Alphabet, Google’s parent, gained by 3.6%.

Microsoft’s new Bing search engine is live in a limited preview on desktop computers and will be available for mobile devices in the coming weeks.

Bing will be powered by artificial intelligence and run on a new “large language model” that is more powerful than ChatGPT, said Microsoft Consumer Chief Marketing Officer Yusuf Mehdi. Bing is currently far behind Google in search market share.

Microsoft is now aiming to market OpenAI’s technology to its cloud customers and add the same power to its suite of products, including search.

Near-term, “the partnership with OpenAI is more relevant for its business customers,” said Gartner analyst Jason Wong, while interacting with AlJazeera. He, however, also said that it could offer “disruptive opportunities” in consumer businesses as well.

“Except for gaming, Microsoft has not been a leader in key consumer technologies, such as search, mobile and social media,” he added.

The rivalry in the field of search engines is now among the industry’s biggest, as OpenAI sets up Microsoft to expand its 9% share at Google’s expense, said Daniel Ives, an analyst with Wedbush Securities.

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