The Google bot Bard learned a language!

 

Artificial intelligence can produce the worst as well as the best. The examples are numerous in both cases and as far as the best one is concerned, Google recently revealed that Bard had learned Bengali almost without human help!

Bard launched a few weeks ago as a waitlisted beta, only in the US and UK, and only in English. Google wants to go step by step, but behind the scenes, things are accelerating. Sundar Pichai, the boss of Alphabet and Google, revealed to CBS that the bot had learned a foreign language, in this case, Bengali, with little or no human intervention.

Bard AI ​​has surprised the internet with its language skills

 

Sundar Pichai adds, "We found that with very little Bengali inquiry, [Bard] can now translate all of Bengali. So now we have a search effort where we're trying to reach a thousand languages,” explained James Manyika, senior vice president of Google. Bard has “read almost everything “on the internet and developed a model of what a language looks like. The bot's responses come from this language model which can be applied to language learning.

Bard is therefore largely self-taught; it does not draw his information from the internet as the Google search engine does. This can have positive spin-offs, like learning Bengali. But this also explains these cases of “hallucinations” where the bot fantasizes: it produces errors with great confidence, thus generating misinformation. Sundar Pichai acknowledged this while ensuring that no one in the field had yet solved this problem. This is one of the biggest challenges facing generative artificial intelligence like Bard or ChatGPT.

Alphabet's CEO also admitted the existence of a "black box". AI researchers can't say why Bard (or other bots) can give such a specific answer. However, he believes that their ability to understand this aspect of technology will improve over time.

Another problem identified by Sundar Pichai: artificial intelligence could also transform the world of work by automating large-scale tasks. Manyika agreed that some occupations may decline, but new categories of jobs may emerge. However, he points out that the most significant change will be in the jobs that will be modified, as they will now be assisted by AI and automation.

The launch of ChatGPT last November shook up Google, which finds itself behind in the race for conversational bots. Microsoft, which has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI (the creator of ChatGPT), has inserted artificial intelligence into Bing and continues to stay high in this field.