Google made an A.I. so woke it drove men mad - by Max Read
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I have a confession to make: I don’t really know what A.I. chatbots are for. I mean, I know that ChatGPT and MidJourney and whatever other LLM-based generative-A.I. chatbots are good at certain things--summarizing and organizing chunks of text, for example, or generating passably detailed images of certain types--and somewhat less good at other things-- playing complete and coherent games of chess, say--and straight-up bad at some things, like citing legal precedent. But in a broader sense, I have no clue what they’re for: What their ideal use is, or even what people want out of them. That’s fine, because I’m a dumb ass who doesn’t understand most things. But I increasingly suspect that none of the people in charge of these chatbots understand what they’re for or what we’re supposed to do with them, either.
Earlier this month, Google announced the release of Gemini 1.5, the latest and “most advanced” of its large language models. Early reviews of the chatbot, at least from the kind of people who review chatbots, were mostly enthusiastic about its capabilities, suggesting that Google had made up ground in an emerging competition with OpenAI. (Though to return to the question from the last paragraph, competition over what, exactly?)
