Google CEO Surprised by Taxi Ride in Korea: "AI Bard Language Support Suitable for Korea"

Google CEO "Korean Language is a Challenging Area for AI"
"Advanced Technology in Korea Makes It Suitable for Bard"

Google's AI chatbot Bard has chosen Korean as its first supported language other than English. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, explained the reason by saying, "Korean is different from English, making it a challenging area for AI development."

On the 11th (local time), at the 'Developer Conference' held at Google's headquarters in Mountain View, California, USA, Google announced that Bard would be fully launched in 180 countries worldwide, including Korea.

Bard is equipped with Google's next-generation large language AI model PaLM2. PaLM2, with over 530 billion parameters, is more than three times larger than GPT-3.5 (about 175 billion parameters) used in OpenAI's ChatGPT.

At this developer conference, Google set Korean and Japanese as Bard's top priority supported languages. The number of supported languages is expected to expand to a total of 40 in the future.

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google
Photo by Yonhap News

Why did Google choose Korean as the first supported language? CEO Pichai held a press conference at the headquarters building right after the developer conference and explained, "Korean is a language very different from English, and moreover, Korea and the United States have different time zones. It is a very dynamic country with advanced technology. For these reasons, Korea was qualified to support Bard's language."

He also shared his past experience visiting Korea. When he visited Seoul in 1999 and took a taxi, CEO Pichai was deeply impressed by the driver using three mobile phones simultaneously.

CEO Pichai also emphasized the importance of AI safety. He said, "I hope more researchers focus on AI safety issues," and added, "There is still much work to be done for AI to be helpful."

He also predicted, "Super-large AI will increase productivity," and "Moreover, search will inevitably change."

When asked whether Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) that can do everything on its own without human commands could emerge in the future, he replied, "The definition of AGI varies among scholars and people," and added, "Google will balance technology and people to ensure that more people can benefit from AI."

Meanwhile, Google Bard was first revealed during a demo preview in February. Initially, Bard was highly anticipated as a rival to ChatGPT, but during the demo, it gave answers mixed with false information, causing disappointment. Google's stock price even plunged more than 10% during trading. Since then, Google conducted a trial launch of Bard in the US and UK and made revisions based on user feedback.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.