Yet it’s folly to draw definitive conclusions based on these early versions of the technology, including the shotgun blast of AI updates announced by Google this week. Folks, this is an illusion. Today’s chatbots are taking baby steps in a journey that will rise to Olympic-level strides. Oren Etzioni, former CEO of nonprofit research lab the Allen Institute for AI, told me this week that they’re already getting better. One force driving that trend is the millions of users—including reporters trying to goad the systems into doing nutty things that make good copy—exposing areas in need of improvement. Computer scientists, whose specialty is optimizing, after all, have been hard at work addressing the flaws.
