When your Artificial Intelligence genius makes a schoolboy error - It costs!
A friend of mine was once at a UK launch of the latest version of a certain operating system from Microsoft. The room was hot and there was no air conditioning. A call went out to open the windows to let some fresh air in. No matter how hard they tried, they just wouldn’t budge – at which point someone in the audience piped up at the top of his voice, “Windows Won’t Open”.
Well, that did it, the rest of the launch was filled with impromptu jokes and innuendo. This was all behind closed doors and no real harm was done.
Google’s embarrassment yesterday, however, was neither a joke nor done in private. It was a public humiliation that say 7% or $100 million wiped off the the group market value.
No matter how sceptical I am about ‘artificial intelligence’ in any meaningful sense, for me that can only happen when accompanied by consciousness, the term AI is being banded about rather a lot. Latest versions of commonly used software will frequently claim to employ AI.
Giants like Microsoft and Google are making big claims about their latest AI abilities and are competing against one another for the headlines.
They say all publicity is good publicity but recent events resulted in headlines that could be done without all the same.
You see, and advert designed to show the AI capability of Bard, Googles new AI bot, showed it answering a question………… incorrectly!
Asked about what to tell a nine-year-old about discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope the response was that the telescope was the first to take pictures of a planet outside the earth’s solar system.
The problem? Well, that milestone was in fact claimed by the European Very Large Telescope way back in 2004.
Is this a question of AI simply not being what it is cracked up to be or because American software, like its people some would say, know nothing about anything that happens outside of the USA?
A bit of both maybe, but either way rubbish in, rubbish out. Not a lot changes there.
