Google's chief executive has said concerns about artificial intelligence keep him awake at night and that the technology can be "very harmful" if deployed wrongly. Sundar Pichai also called for a global regulatory framework for AI similar to the treaties used to regulate nuclear arms use, as he warned that the competition to produce advances in the technology could lead to concerns about safety being pushed aside. In an interview on CBS's 60 minutes programme, Pichai said the negative side to AI gave him restless nights. "It can be very harmful if deployed wrongly and we don't have all the answers there yet – and the technology is moving fast. So does that keep me up at night? Google's parent, Alphabet, owns the UK-based AI company DeepMind and has launched an AI-powered chatbot, Bard, in response to ChatGPT, a chatbot developed by the US tech firm OpenAI, which has become a phenomenon since its release in November. Pichai said governments would need to figure out global frameworks for regulating AI as it developed. Last month thousands of artificial intelligence experts, researchers and backers – including the Twitter owner Elon Musk – signed a letter calling for a pause in the creation of "giant" AIs for at least six months, amid concerns that development of the technology could get out of control. Asked if nuclear arms-style frameworks could be needed, Pichai said: "We would need that." The AI technology behind ChatGPT and Bard, known as a Large Language Model, is trained on a vast trove of data taken from the internet and is able to produce plausible responses to prompts from users in a range of formats, from poems to academic essays and software coding. The image-generating equivalent, in systems such as Dall-E and Midjourney, has also triggered a mixture of astonishment and alarm by producing realistic images such as the Pope sporting a puffer jacket. Pichai added that AI could cause harm through its ability to produce disinformation "It will be possible with AI to create, you know, a video easily.

Experts are looking at ways to create AI which will ultimately benefit humanity and Google's director of engineering, Ray Kurzweil, backs up that theory. However, he insists mankind will have to endure "difficult episodes" on the way to achieving machine learning which falls in line with our goals. Mr Kurzweil said at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) in Washington, DC, that technology is a "double-edged sword" which has helped and hindered humans, and he expects the same of AI. The 69-year old said: "Technology has always been a double-edged sword. Fire kept us warm, cooked our food and burned down our houses.

Mr Kurzweil continued by stating that predictions that AI will enslave humans is "not realistic", adding that it is already ubiquitous. He said: "We don't have one or two AIs in the world. What he envisions is actually a world where AI's purpose is to benefit humanity, rather than exceed it, before predicting that we will one day finally merge with machines which, he believes, will massively improve us as beings.

Following last week's predictions by Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai showed that the search giant has a vision about artificial intelligence too. Quizzed on parent Alphabet's Q1 2016 investor call about areas where Google is pushing forward innovation, Pichai said search, particularly on mobile devices, has the opportunity to become closer to a personal assistant for users and, to fulfill that vision, must deploy machine learning and AI. "And overall, I do think in the long run, I think we will evolve in computing from a mobile first to an AI first world. And I do think we are at the forefront of development," he said, polishing the search giant's credentials just a week after founder Mark Zuckerberg made a similar claim for Facebook at the F8 developer event. AI-based chatbots, for instance for Facebook Messenger, was a big theme at the social giant's event. Pichai also referenced the "great strides" made by AlphaGo, developed by Google subsidiary DeepMind, which shocked audiences when it beat a professional South Korean Go player in Seoul last month.