What Chatbot Bloopers Reveal About the Future of AI

What a difference seven days makes in the world of generative AI. Last week Satya Nadella, Microsoft's CEO, was gleefully telling the world that the new AI-infused Bing search engine would "make Google dance" by challenging its long-standing dominance in web search. The new Bing uses a little thing called ChatGPT--you may have heard of it--which represents a significant leap in computers' ability to handle language. Thanks to advances in machine learning, it essentially figured out for itself how to answer all kinds of questions by gobbling up trillions of lines of text, much of it scraped from the web. Google did, in fact, dance to Satya's tune by announcing Bard, its answer to ChatGPT, and promising to use the technology in its own search results.