Concerns about AI developing skills regardless of the wishes of its programmers have long engrossed scientists, ethicists and science fiction writers. A recent interview with Google executives may add to these worries.
In an interview on CBS 60 minutes On April 16, James Manyika, Google’s senior vice president for technology and society, explained how one of the company’s AI systems taught itself Bengali, even though it didn’t been trained to know the language. “We found that with very little prompting in Bengali, he can now translate all Bengali,” he said.
Pichai confirmed that there are still elements of how AI systems learn and behave that still surprise experts: “There’s an aspect of it that we call – all of us in the field call it a “black box”. You don’t quite understand. And you can’t really tell why he said that. The CEO said the company had “some ideas” as to why this might be the case, but needed more research to fully understand how it worked.
CBS’ Scott Pelley then questioned the reasoning for opening up to the public a system that its own developers don’t fully understand, but Pichai replied, “I don’t think we fully understand how a human mind works either.”
Google’s cure for the AI hallucination problem
The development of AI has also come with glaring flaws that lead to fake news, deepfakes and weaponization, sometimes so confidently, in what the industry calls “hallucinations”.
When asked if Google’s Bard has a lot of “hallucinations,” Pichai replied, “Yeah, you know, expected. No one in the field has yet solved the problems of hallucination. All models have this as a problem. The remedy, Pichai said, is to develop “more robust layers of security before building, before deploying better models.”
Pichai has long advocated for a wide range AI global regulation. Other tech leaders, like Twitter and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, have even called for a break in development more powerful models. Chinese lawmakers have already make new ruleswhile in Europe And in the USA the regulatory process is still in its nascent phase.