‘60 Minutes’ Made a Very Bad Claim About a Google AI Chatbot

Since OpenAI unleashed ChatGPT on the world, we’ve seen takes you people wouldn’t believe. Some folks have claimed that chatbots have a woke agenda. U.S. Senator Chris Murphy tweeted that ChatGPT “taught” itself advanced chemistry. Even seasoned tech journalists have written stories about how the chatbot fell in love with them. It seems as though the world is reacting to AI the same way cavemen probably reacted when they saw fire for the first time: with utter confusion and incoherent babbling.

One of the latest examples comes from 60 Minutes, which threw its voice in the ring with a new episode focused on innovations in AI that aired on CBS Sunday. The episode featured interviews with the likes of Google CEO Sundar Pichai—and included questionable claims about one of the company's large language models (LLM).

The topic of the clip is about emergent behavior, which describes an unexpected side effect of an AI system that wasn’t necessarily intended by the model’s developers. We’ve already seen emergent behavior spring up in other recent AI projects. For example, researchers recently used ChatGPT to create generative digital characters with goals and background in a study posted online last week. They observed the system performing multiple emergent behaviors such as sharing new information from one character to another and even forming relationships with one another—something the authors didn’t initially have planned for the system.

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