The competition between Google and Microsoft in the realm of AI chatbots has taken a new turn as a former Google employee claimed that Google used OpenAI’s chatbot data to train its own chatbot, Bard.
The former AI researcher, Jacob Devlin, allegedly quit Google after expressing his concerns to Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and other top executives about the way Bard was being trained. Devlin believed that the team behind Bard was using ShareGPT, a platform where users post the exchanges they’ve had with OpenAI’s chatbot, which would not only violate OpenAI’s terms of service but also result in Bard’s responses sounding too similar to ChatGPT.
According to a report from The Information, Google stopped using ChatGPT in its efforts to train Bard after Devlin raised concerns. However, Google has maintained that Bard is built using LaMDA, its language model. A Google spokesperson said in a statement to The Verge that “Bard is not trained on any data from ShareGPT or ChatGPT.”
Despite this, there have been speculations that Google’s announcement and eventual public testing of Bard seemed like a reactive move to ChatGPT’s growing popularity. Google is reportedly ramping up its efforts to make Bard compete with ChatGPT by bringing together two of its major AI teams to collaborate on it, an effort reportedly dubbed “Gemini.”
Meanwhile, Microsoft has integrated ChatGPT into its Bing search engine, which has been growing in use. This has intensified the competition between the two tech giants. It is no secret that Google and Microsoft have been feuding over various issues, and now the battle between AI chatbots seems to be heating up as well.
As the competition between the chatbots of the two tech giants continues, it is clear that both companies are using all the tools at their disposal to gain an edge in this field.
However, it remains to be seen which chatbot will ultimately come out on top.