OpenAI CEO Sam Altman says he is not annoyed by Google using ChatGPT data for training Bard

By Divyanshi SharmaGoogle’s AI chatbot Bard didn’t really have a smooth landing when it was launched. Launched in an attempt to compete with ChatGPT, Bard was criticized for its inaccuracy shortly after its launch and had also made a factual error in its introduction advertisement. Around the same time, reports of Google’s Paris press conference goof-up had surfaced as the company was left embarrassed when a demo phone went missing all of a sudden, hinting that the event lacked planning. And recently, it was being reported that Google was using ChatGPT’s data to train Bard. The company has vehemently declined these rumours. However, OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, says that he is not annoyed by Google’s use of ChatGPT data.

Sam Altman on Google using ChatGPT data

In a tweet on Friday, Sam Altman wrote, “I’m not that annoyed at Google for training on ChatGPT output but the spin is annoying.”

When Google denied training Bard on ChatGPT data

A report by The Information had said that Google had trained Bard using ChatGPT’s data that it obtained through a website called ShareGPT. The tech giant, however, in a statement to The Verge, declined these allegations. “Bard is not trained on any data from ShareGPT or ChatGPT,” spokesperson Chris Pappas said.

The Information’s report had also mentioned how former Google AI engineer Jacob Devlin quit the company to join OpenAI. The ex-Google employee had apparently ‘warned Google to not use ChatGPT’s data since it would violate OpenAI’s service terms’. A source also told The Information that Google had stopped using ChatGPT’s data after the former employee’s ‘warnings’.

Sundar Pichai on Bard

Google had rolled out Bard for public testing recently. The chatbot was previously not available for use to the public. However, in a recent official blog post, Google announced that Bard will be available for testing to some selected users in the US and UK. People who wish to use the new AI chatbot in town must sign up for the waitlist and wait to get access.

Bard is new in the AI space and is in the initial stages of testing, which is why it is bound to make a few errors every now and then. Google CEO Sundar Pichai had also warned his employees about Bard’s possible mistakes in an email to employees, a CNBC report revealed.

“As more people start to use Bard and test its capabilities, they’ll surprise us. Things will go wrong,” Pichai wrote in the email sent to Google employees.

More recently, in a podcast with the New York Times’ Hard Fork, Pichai said that Bard is expected to generate better responses soon and will get major upgrades as soon as next week. Saying that the company has more capable models, Pichai added, “Pretty soon, perhaps as this [podcast] goes live, we will be upgrading Bard to some of our more capable PaLM models, which will bring more capabilities; be it in reasoning, coding, it can answer maths questions better. So you will see progress over the course of next week.”

Pichai also addressed rumours of a ‘code red’ situation at Google after ChatGPT’s arrival. He said that he himself never issued the ‘code red’ situation. However, he added that perhaps there were others in the company who “sent emails saying there is a code red.”