Google: Here is what’s keeping Google CEO Sundar Pichai up at night – Times of India

Alphabet and Google CEO Sundar Pichai has been pretty vocal on the company’s approach towards launching artificial intelligence (AI) services in its products. In yet another interview, the company’s top executive suggested that companies should be cautious in pushing the adoption of the technology.
According to a report in Bloomberg, Pichai said “the urgency to work and deploy it in a beneficial way, but at the same time it can be very harmful if deployed wrongly.”
“We don’t have all the answers there yet, and the technology is moving fast,” Pichai said. “So does that keep me up at night? Absolutely.”
In his previous interviews, he said Google is taking a measured approach in releasing AI tools. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt also urged global tech companies to come together and develop standards and appropriate guardrails

The company also labels Bard, its AI-powered chatbot, as an “experiment” despite being falling behind in announcing AI-powered services in the Workspace suite. Meanwhile, Microsoft has been moving forward with launching AI tools at a fast pace.
Google playing catch-up in AI race
OpenAI has been using generative AI in several products that can be used to create texts, images, music and videos based on user prompts. For example, OpenAI’s products include ChatGPT that can write paragraphs and make tables, among others on user inputs. Similarly, Dall-E can create images based on users text.
“Despite the sense of urgency in the industry, Pichai cautioned against companies being swept up in the competitive dynamics,” the report noted.

‘AI needs societal regulations’
Pichai said people need time to adapt to this “very, very powerful” technology and companies should learn from pitfalls from previous incidents [like deepfake videos].
“One of the points they [OpenAI] have made is, you don’t want to put out a tech like this when it’s very, very powerful because it gives society no time to adapt. I think that’s a reasonable perspective. I think there are responsible people there trying to figure out how to approach this technology, and so are we,” Pichai said.
While talking about deepfake videos, he highlighted the risks of generative AI. In deepfake videos, individuals, including politicians, actors and people of clout can be portrayed uttering remarks that they did not give.
“There have to be consequences for creating deepfake videos which cause harm to society,” he said.
“Anybody who has worked with AI for a while, you know, you realise this is something so different and so deep that we would need societal regulations to think about how to adapt,” the executive added.