Doctors often have a piece of advice for the rest of us: Don't Google it. The search giant tends to be the first stop for people hoping to answer every health-related question: Why is my scab oozing? What is this pink bump on my arm? Search for symptoms, and you might click through to WebMD and other sites that can provide an overwhelming possibility of reasons for what's ailing you. The experience of freaking out about what you find online is so common that researchers have a word for it: cyberchondria.

Baidu today revealed more details about its much-anticipated intelligent Ernie Bot, widely seen as the search giant's counterpart to ChatGPT. Ernie Bot is built atop Baidu's large language model Erniethat released in 2019. In May last year, the third generation of Ernie launched. Here's how Baidu plans to integrate Ernie Bot into its ecosystem of services, said the firm's founder and CEO Robin Li in a letter to staff today. "The integration of ERNIE Bot with Baidu Search will lead to a generational change in the search experience."

But exactly how does Google plan to roll out its own AI chatbot, especially LaMDA, which has been limited beta testing for a while now. Let's take a look at what we know so far about Google's own approach to AI, and why it could go big on this in 2023. Anthropic is not Google's first big-ticket investment in artificial intelligence technologies. In 2014, Google's parent company, Alphabet acquired British AI laboratory DeepMind. DeepMind is known for, among other things, developing the AlphaGo program that beat world champion Go player Lee Sedol in 2016; AlphaZero, which was able to defeat seasoned chess programs like Stockfish; and AlphaFold, which predicted the shape of nearly all proteins known to science.

One of the big tech highlights of the year, as 2022 draws to a close, is the progress that continues to be made in artificial intelligence (AI). Machine-generated art produced using tools such as OpenAI's DALLE-2 or Stability AI's Stable Diffusion model (now on version 2.1) has seen AI cross over into popular culture. Machine learning algorithms have been whirring away in the background for decades, protecting firms against financial crime and in other use cases. But this latest, highly visible crop of AI applications has mainstream appeal, which brings our discussion to ChatGPT versus Google. Typing a search phrase into Google has become the go-to way for discovering all kinds of information ranging from'how to cook a vegan casserole' to'the best way of configuring an Apache HTTP server on Ubuntu'.

Google LLC today began rolling out its AI Test Kitchen app, which will enable users to interact with advanced neural networks developed by the search giant's engineers. The app will allow members of the public to interact with Google's newest artificial intelligence models and provide feedback. According to the company, the feedback collected through the app will be used to improve its AI software. Members of the public can request access to AI Test Kitchen through a web page that Google has created for the app. Initially, it will "gradually roll out to small groups of users in the U.S.," Google product management executives Tris Warkentin and Josh Woodward wrote in a blog post today.

In a building called the Partnerplex on Google's sprawling campus in Mountain View, California, I've been invited to hear a 51-second phone recording of someone making a dinner reservation. Person 2: Hi, um, I'd like to reserve a table for Friday the third. Person 1: OK, hold on one moment. As I listen to what sounds like a man and a woman talking, Google's top executives for Assistant, the search giant's digital helper, watch closely to gauge my reaction. They're showing off the Assistant's new tricks a few days before Google I/O, the company's annual developer conference that starts Tuesday. Turns out this particular trick is pretty wild. That's because Person 2, the one who sounds like a man, isn't a person at all.

Our mission to make business better is fueled by readers like you. To enjoy unlimited access to our journalism, subscribe today. Alex Spinelli, chief technologist for business software maker LivePerson, says the recent U.S. Capitol riot shows the potential dangers of a technology not usually associated with pro-Trump mobs: artificial intelligence. The same machine-learning tech that helps companies target people with online ads on Facebook and Twitter also helps bad actors distribute propaganda and misinformation. In 2016, for instance, people shared fake news articles on Facebook, whose A.I. systems then funneled them to users.

Timnit Gebru, a co-leader of Google's Ethical Artificial Intelligence team, said late Wednesday that she'd been abruptly fired from the search giant over an email she sent to colleagues. Gebru, a prominent AI researcher, has done studies on the dangers of facial recognition bias and has spoken out on the lack of diversity in the tech industry. In the wake of her departure, more than 1,400 Google workers, as well as more than 1,800 other industry professionals, signed an open letter in support of Gebru. "Instead of being embraced by Google as an exceptionally talented and prolific contributor, Dr. Gebru has faced defensiveness, racism, gaslighting, research censorship, and now a retaliatory firing," the letter read. In a series of tweets Wednesday night, Gebru said she was terminated for a message she sent to Google Brain Women and Allies, an internal email list at the company.

Ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphs over four millennia ago to engrave and record their stories. Today, only a select group of people know how to read or interpret those inscriptions. To read and decipher the ancient hieroglyphic writing, researchers and scholars have been using the Rosetta Stone, an irregularly shaped black granite stone. In 2017, game developer Ubisoft launched an initiative to use AI and machine learning to understand the written language of the Pharoahs. The initiative brought researchers from Australia's Macquarie University and Google's Art and Culture division togther.

Cerner was interviewing Silicon Valley giants to pick a storage provider for 250 million health records, one of the largest collections of U.S. patient data. Google dispatched former chief executive Eric Schmidt to personally pitch Cerner over several phone calls and offered around $250 million in discounts and incentives, people familiar with the matter say. Google had a bigger goal in pushing for the deal than dollars and cents: a way to expand its effort to collect, analyze and aggregate health data on millions of Americans. Google representatives were vague in answering questions about how Cerner's data would be used, making the health-care company's executives wary, the people say. Eventually, Cerner struck a storage deal with Amazon.com The failed Cerner deal reveals an emerging challenge to Google's move into health care: gaining the trust of health care partners and the public.