Vint Cerf, vice president and “chief Internet evangelist” at Google and one of the “Fathers of the Internet” alongside TCP/IP co-developer Bob Kahn, urged entrepreneurs at a Mountain View conference on Monday to avoid rushing into investments in AI- and machine learning-powered chatbots like ChatGPT (via CNBC).
Cerf warned business executives against making or advising others to make hasty investments in conversational AI just because “it’s a hot topic.” The internet pioneer’s warning comes after OpenAI’s ChatGPT stirred up a storm with its launch last year.
Since its launch, ChatGPT has surpassed 100 million active users in record time and kicked off an AI arms race in the tech space. “There’s an ethical issue here that I hope some of you will consider,” Cerf said during his speech at Monday’s conference.
“Everybody’s talking about ChatGPT or Google’s version of that and we know it doesn’t always work the way we would like it to,” he said. Google last week announced Bard, an experimental conversational service and the tech giant’s answer to ChatGPT.
That’s not all, either — major tech players ranging from Microsoft and Meta to China’s Alibaba and Baidu, and even Quora, have all announced plans for their own ChatGPT competitors or products that incorporate the OpenAI service.
Cerf advised attendees to resist the temptation to invest in the technology right now just because it is “really cool, even though it doesn’t work quite right all the time.”
“If you think ‘man, I can sell this to investors because it’s a hot topic and everyone will throw money at me,’ don’t do that,” Cerf said.
“Be thoughtful. You were right that we can’t always predict what’s going to happen with these technologies and to be honest with you, most of the problem is people—that’s why we people haven’t changed in the last 400 years let alone the last 4,000.”
“They will seek to do that which is their benefit and not yours,” Cerf continued, presumably talking about general human greed. “So we have to remember that and be thoughtful about how we use these technologies.
He went on to point out that all of these systems are “a long ways away from awareness or self-awareness,” often refusing to do what they are told. According to the Google exec, there can be a significant gap between what an AI chatbot says it will do and what it does.
What’s more, he added that AI chatbots have the potential to do harm despite already being publicly available. Cerf was referring to these systems’ well-documented penchant to present fiction as fact.
When faced with questions they don’t know the answers to, AI chatbots have a tendency to fill in the blanks themselves and confidently present their responses as factual.
“On the engineering side, I think engineers like me should be responsible for trying to find a way to tame some of these technologies so that they are less likely to cause harm. And of course, depending on the application, a not-very-good-fiction story is one thing. Giving advice to somebody… can have medical consequences. Figuring out how to minimize the worst-case potential is very important.”
