From relationships to business, life often presents us with difficult choices. The good news – or the bad, depending on one’s point of view – is that Google may soon be making the decisions for us.
The Mountain View-based tech behemoth is reportedly testing an artificial intelligence (AI) application that will offer recommendations regarding problems people have in their lives, according to an exclusive New York Times story.
Google’s DeepMind division and Brain, an AI team it founded in Silicon Valley, are now researching ambitious new capabilities that might transform generative AI — the technology powering chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s own Bard — into a personal life coach.
At least 21 distinct sorts of personal and professional activities, including tools that provide users life counsel, ideas, planning guidance, and tutoring recommendations, have been carried out by Google DeepMind utilizing generative AI.
The Times story claims that a user may provide a situation of not being able to pay airfare to a close friend’s destination wedding and ask the chatbot what to do about it. There would also be tools for food planning, money management, and teaching users new skills.
This would represent a significant shift from Google’s existing AI policy, which prevents its Bard chatbot from offering this type of guidance as its AI specialists cautioned corporate management in December not to allow users to grow overly emotionally attached in chatbots.
“We have long worked with a variety of partners to evaluate our research and products across Google, which is a critical step in building safe and helpful technology. At any time there are many such evaluations ongoing. Isolated samples of evaluation data are not representative of our product road map,” a Google DeepMind spokeswoman elusively said.
However, Google may never really make these capabilities available to the general public; they are currently just being tested, as The Times pointed out.
