Google CEO admits he, experts 'don't fully understand' how AI works

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Google CEO admits people ‘don’t fully understand’ how artificial intelligence works

Sundar Pichai told ’60 Minutes’ that the state of the technology is still somewhat of a black box to researchers.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai warned society may not be ready for the advancement of artificial intelligence (AI), and that neither he nor other experts fully understand how generative AI models like ChatGPT actually work. 

AI models like ChatGPT and Google's Bard are capable of near-human like conversation, writing text, code, even poems and song lyrics in response to user queries. But the chatbots are also known to get things wrong, often referred to as "hallucinations." 

Pichai said experts in the field have "some ideas" as to why chatbots make the statements they do, including hallucinations, but compared it to a "black box." 

"There is an aspect of this which we call, all of us in the field, call it a black box. You don’t fully tell why it said this, or why it got wrong. We have some ideas, and our ability to understand this gets better over time, but that’s where the state of the art is," he said. 

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Pichai further compared AI chatbots to the human mind, noting there are some elements of how the brain works that remain a mystery. 

"Let me put it this way, I don’t think we fully understand how the human mind works either," he added. 

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False statements coming from chatbots like Google’s Bard were something to be expected, the CEO previously warned in a memo to the company. 

"Things will go wrong," Pichai wrote in a memo to Google employees last month, adding that "user feedback is critical to improving the product and the underlying technology." 

During the same interview with "60 Minutes," Pichai said "every product of every company" would be affected by advancing AI capabilities and society needs to "adapt" to prepare. 

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"For example, you could be a radiologist, if you think about five to 10 years from now, you’re going to have an AI collaborator with you," he said. "You come in the morning, let’s say you have a hundred things to go through, it may say, ‘these are the most serious cases you need to look at first.'" 

Pichai also compared the development of AI to technological advancements in other areas, calling it "more profound" than the discovery of fire and electricity. 

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"We are developing technology which, for sure, one day will be far more capable than anything we’ve ever seen before," he said.