Head Of Google Search Engines Warns Of AI Risks On Chatbots

JAKARTA - The head of Google's search engine, Prabhakar Raghavan, warned about the dangers of artificial intelligence in chatbots, in an interview published on Saturday, February 11, as parent company Alphabet struggles to compete with the popular application ChatGPT.

"The kind of artificial intelligence we're talking about today can create hallucinations," Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president at Google and head of Google's Search Engine, told the German newspaper Welt am Sonntag.

"It then expresses itself in a machine way providing convincing but completely contrived answers," Raghavan added in comments published in German. One of the basic tasks, he adds, is to keep this to a minimum.

Google was already under pressure after OpenAI, a startup backed by Microsoft with around 10 billion US dollars (IDR 151 trillion), introduced ChatGPT in November, which has since amazed users with remarkably human-like answers.

Alphabet Inc introduced Bard, its own chatbot, this week, but the software shared inaccurate information in a promotional video that cost the company $100 billion in losses on Wednesday, February 8.

Alphabet, which is still conducting user testing on Bard, has not indicated when the app could be published.

"We certainly feel anxiety, but we also feel a great sense of responsibility," said Raghavan. "We certainly don't want to lie to the public."