Google stalled release of chatbot ‘for years,’ WSJ reports

Google (GOOGL) stalled the release of a powerful chatbot for years due to the risk AI demos could pose to its reputation and search ads business, The Wall Street Journal’s Miles Kruppa and Sam Schechner report. According to people familiar with the matter, researchers Daniel De Freitas and Noam Shazeer told colleagues that chatbots like theirs would revolutionize the way people searched the internet and interacted with computers, but Google executives rebuffed their efforts to get it integrated into the Google Assistant virtual helper, saying that the program didn’t meet company standards for the safety and fairness of AI systems. Last month Microsoft (MSFT) announced plans to infuse its Bing search engine with the technology behind chatbot ChatGPT, and Google is now taking steps toward publicly releasing its own chatbot based in part on technology De Freitas and Shazeer worked on. Reference Link