Big Tech Hasn't Fixed AI's Misinformation Problem--Yet

The scrappy underdog AI firm OpenAI has stirred the sleeping tech giants with its generative AI products, most recently and most prominently the conversational chatbot ChatGPT. Microsoft spent $10 billion on a partnership with OpenAI in an attempt to leap-frog its younger big tech competitors by weaving AI into many products; Google internally declared a "code red" and is cutting red tape to put out AI products more quickly, including a direct competitor to ChatGPT that was just announced; meanwhile Mark Zuckerberg has declared his intent to make Meta a "leader in generative AI," clearly a reaction to the attention OpenAI is garnering. The products these companies are suddenly striving for sound similar, but who will be the winner? Although much discussion has centered around the size of the AI models and how much data they are trained on, there's another factor that may matter a lot, too: the degree to which the contenders build trustworthy systems that don't unduly harm society and further destabilize democracy. OpenAI's earlier text generation product GPT-3 grabbed a lot of attention but never saw the widespread consumer adoption that ChatGPT has attained.