Because of the overlap between the worlds of consumer tech and artificial intelligence, this same logic is now often applied to systems like OpenAI's language models. This is true not only of the sort of hucksters who post hyperbolic Twitter threads predicting that superintelligent AI will be here in a matter of years because the numbers keep getting bigger but also of more informed and sophisticated commentators. As a lot of claims made about AI superintelligence are essentially unfalsifiable, these individuals rely on similar rhetoric to get their point across. They draw vague graphs with axes labeled "progress" and "time," plot a line going up and to the right, and present this uncritically as evidence.

People haven't exactly been impressed in the short time since Google released its "experimental conversational AI service" Bard. Coming up against OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Bing Chat (also powered by OpenAI's GPT-4) users have found its responses to not be as knowledgeable or detailed as its rivals. That could be set to change, however, after Google CEO Sundar Pichai confirmed on The New York Times podcast "Hard Fork" that Bard will soon be moving from its current LaMDA-based model to larger-scale PaLM datasets in the coming days. When asked how he felt about responses to Bard's release, Pichai commented: "We clearly have more capable models. Pretty soon, maybe as this goes live, we will be upgrading Bard to some of our more capable PaLM models, so which will bring more capabilities, be it in reasoning, coding." To frame the difference, Google said it had trained LaMDA with 137 billion parameters when it shared details about the language-based models last year.

Google on Monday finally confirmed a secretive project that's been fueling an employee-led backlash for weeks at the company: an effort to build a version of its search engine that complies with China's online censorship regime. The project, code-named Dragonfly, is not only real but is already performing to the satisfaction of top Google executives. And it could pave the way for Google to reenter China's online search market after nearly a decade. "If Google were to operate in China, what would it look like? What queries will we be able to serve?" chief executive Sundar Pichai said during an event hosted by Wired on Monday night.