A Google executive told a German newspaper that the current form of generative AI, such as ChatGPT, can be unreliable and slip into a dream-like zoned state.

“This kind of artificial intelligence that we’re talking about can sometimes lead to something we call hallucination,” Prabhakar Raghavan, senior vice president at Google and head of Google Search, told me. Welt am Sonntag.

“It manifests itself in such a way that a machine gives a convincing but completely fabricated answer,” he said.

Indeed, many ChatGPT users, including Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, have complained that the AI ​​is often wrong.

Errors in encoding and decoding between text and representations can cause artificial intelligence hallucinations.

Ted Chiang on ChatGPT’s “hallucinations”: “if a compression algorithm is designed to reconstruct text after 99% of the original has been discarded, we should expect that significant portions of what it generates will be completely made up…” https://t.co/7QP6zBgrd3

— Matt Bell (@mdbell79) February 9, 2023

It was unclear whether Raghavan was referring to Google’s own forays into generative AI.

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Last week, the company announced that it is testing a chatbot called Bard Apprentice. The technology is built on LaMDA technology, the same as OpenAI’s grand language model for ChatGPT.

The Paris demonstration was regarded as a public relations disaster, as investors were largely unimpressed.

Google developers have been under a lot of pressure since the launch of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has taken the world by storm and threatens Google’s core business.

“We clearly feel the urgency, but we also feel the great responsibility,” Raghavan told the paper. “We certainly don’t want to mislead the public.”