IMAGINE living in a city that, overnight, changed all its road signs. Some of them are still familiar, directing you to the city centre, while others offer more whimsical destinations such as the moon or Narnia. Some changes streamline the driving experience, while a few are outright dangerous, such as a speed limit of 300 miles per hour. “Oh, we know it doesn’t quite work,” say the city planners. “But the neighbouring city is going to do it and we wanted to get there first. Will you test it for us so we can win?”
We would rightly question the competence of anyone wanting to alter vital city infrastructure in this way and yet search engines, a key part of our internet infrastructure, are being subjected to a similar experiment. As we report on in our article “How AI chatbots in search engines will completely change the internet”, Google, Microsoft and Baidu are racing to add artificial intelligence chatbots to their search offerings, with the last two attempting to wrest a 90 per cent market share away from Google. But the large language models behind these bots simply aren’t ready for mainstream use.
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Releasing half-finished software, known as the “minimum viable product” in Silicon Valley circles, allows upstart tech firms to quickly release a new app and iterate based on user feedback, and it has its place. But these chatbots are being created by some of the largest companies in the world, on which billions of people rely, and they have a duty of care. Already, Microsoft has had to rein in the AI version of its Bing search engine, after finding that lengthy questioning can lead to it offering results that appear increasingly bizarre.
Large language models certainly could be transformative in the way their proponents hope, but they have been allowed to escape from the lab far too early. This is partly due to raw economics – the scale of these models makes them too costly for individuals to run, limiting researchers’ abilities to create and study their own – but also to the particular brand of hypercapitalism practised by tech firms, racing to exploit the next big thing. If our chatbot future is indeed coming, there is no need to rush.
