Microsoft tries to justify AI’s tendency to give wrong answers by saying they’re ‘usefully wrong’
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella speaks at the company’s Ignite Spotlight event in Seoul on Nov. 15, 2022.
SeongJoon Cho | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Thanks to recent advances in artificial intelligence, new tools like ChatGPT are wowing consumers with their ability to create compelling writing based on people’s queries and prompts.
While these AI-powered tools have gotten much better at producing creative and sometimes humorous responses, they often include inaccurate information.
For instance, in February when Microsoft debuted its Bing chat tool, built using the GPT-4 technology created by Microsoft-backed OpenAI, people noticed that the tool was providing wrong answers during a demo related to financial earnings reports. Like other AI language tools, including similar software from Google, the Bing chat feature can occasionally present fake facts that users might believe to be the ground truth, a phenomenon that researchers call a “hallucination.”
These problems with the facts haven’t slowed down the AI race between the two tech giants.
On Tuesday, Google announced it was bringing AI-powered chat technology to Gmail and Google Docs, letting it help composing emails or documents. On Thursday, Microsoft said that its popular business apps like Word and Excel would soon come bundled with ChatGPT-like technology dubbed Copilot.
But this time, Microsoft is pitching the technology as being “usefully wrong.”
In an online presentation about the new Copilot features, Microsoft executives brought up the software’s tendency to produce inaccurate responses, but pitched that as something that could be useful. As long as people realize that Copilot’s responses could be sloppy with the facts, they can edit the inaccuracies and more quickly send their emails or finish their presentation slides.
For instance, if a person wants to create an email wishing a family member a happy birthday, Copilot can still be helpful even if it presents the wrong birth date. In Microsoft’s view, the mere fact that the tool generated text saved a person some time and is therefore useful. People just need to take extra care and make sure the text doesn’t contain any errors.
Researchers might disagree.
Indeed, some technologists like Noah Giansiracusa and Gary Marcus have voiced concerns that people may place too much trust in modern-day AI, taking to heart advice tools like ChatGPT present when they ask questions about health, finance and other high-stakes topics.
“ChatGPT’s toxicity guardrails are easily evaded by those bent on using it for evil and as we saw earlier this week, all the new search engines continue to hallucinate,” the two wrote in a recent Time opinion piece. “But once we get past the opening day jitters, what will really count is whether any of the big players can build artificial intelligence that we can genuinely trust.”
It’s unclear how reliable Copilot will be in practice.
Microsoft chief scientist and technical fellow Jaime Teevan said that when Copilot “gets things wrong or has biases or is misused,” Microsoft has “mitigations in place.” In addition, Microsoft will be testing the software with only 20 corporate customers at first so it can discover how it works in the real world, she explained.
“We’re going to make mistakes, but when we do, we’ll address them quickly,” Teevan said.
The business stakes are too high for Microsoft to ignore the enthusiasm over generative AI technologies like ChatGPT. The challenge will be for the company to incorporate that technology so that it doesn’t create public mistrust in the software or lead to major public relations disasters.
“I studied AI for decades and I feel this huge sense of responsibility with this powerful new tool,” Teevan said. “We have a responsibility to get it into people’s hands and to do so in the right way.”
Courtesy: Uber Eats
Uber said Monday that Pierre-Dimitri Gore-Coty, one of the company’s longest-tenured top executives and the head of is delivery business is leaving after almost 13 years.
Gore-Coty joined Uber as a general manager in France in 2012, and worked his way up to become vice president of mobility for the Europe and Middle East region four years later, according to his LinkedIn profile. He was named senior vice president of delivery in 2021.
“It’s hard to imagine Uber without Pierre, because there hasn’t been much Uber without Pierre,” CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in a statement that was part of a regulatory filing. “As one of our first employees, he was a driving force behind our global Mobility expansion and stepped up to run Uber Eats just weeks before the first Covid lockdowns.”
The company didn’t say what Gore-Coty plans to do next.
Uber also said that Andrew Macdonald, the company’s senior vice president of mobility and business operations, will become chief operating officer, reporting to Khosrowshahi. Macdonald, 41, will oversee the company’s global mobility, delivery and autonomous businesses in addition to “key cross-platform functions like membership, customer support, safety, and more,” the filing said.
Gore-Coty is one of 11 people listed on Uber’s executive team page. Macdonald is the only one who has worked at the company longer. He joined in May 2012, four months before Gore-Coty, according to LinkedIn.
“These last nearly 13 years have been the ride of a lifetime,” Gore-Coty said in the statement. “It was a true team effort, and I’m so proud of what we’ve built and the impact we’ve had on daily life in cities around the world.”
Uber shares were little changed in extended trading after closing on Monday at $83.64. The stock is up 39% this year, while the Nasdaq is about flat.
Last month, the company reported first-quarter results that beat on earnings but missed on revenue. A month earlier, the Federal Trade Commission sued Uber, alleging that the company engaged in “deceptive billing and cancellation practices” related to its Uber One subscription service.
In an interview with CNBC’s “Squawk Box,” Khosrowshahi characterized the lawsuit as “a bit of a head-scratcher for us.”
WATCH: Record earnings and policy uncertainty will slow the equity rally.
Packages with the logo of Amazon are transported at a packing station of a redistribution center of Amazon in Horn-Bad Meinberg, western Germany, on Dec. 9, 2024.
Ina Fassbender | Afp | Getty Images
German antitrust regulators warned Amazon on Monday that the company’s pricing mechanisms for third-party sellers could run afoul of competition laws.
The Federal Cartel Office said in its preliminary assessment that Amazon’s pricing controls limit the visibility of merchants’ products and, “based on non-transparent marketplace rules,” interfere with their freedom to set prices.
Amazon uses algorithms and statistical models to calculate certain price caps for products, the Cartel Office said. Products that are flagged as having “prices that are too high” or “prices that are not competitive” can then be demoted in search results, excluded from advertising or removed from the buy box, they added.
The buy box is the listing that pops up first when a visitor clicks on a particular product, and the one that gets purchased when a shopper taps “Add to Cart.”
“Competition in online retail in Germany is largely determined by Amazon’s rules for the trading platform,” Federal Cartel Office President Andreas Mundt said in a statement. “Since Amazon competes directly with other marketplace retailers on its platform, influencing competitors’ pricing, even in the form of price caps, is fundamentally questionable from a competition perspective.”
Amazon’s pricing practices not only threaten sellers’ businesses, but could also harm other retailers by deterring them from offering lower prices, the Cartel Office said.
An Amazon spokesperson said the company strongly disagrees with the Cartel Office’s preliminary findings. They added that any changes to Amazon’s pricing mechanisms would be “bad for customers and selling partners.”
“If Amazon is prevented from helping people find competitively priced offers, it will lead to a bad shopping experience for them, as we’d need to promote uncompetitive or even abusive pricing in our store,” the spokesperson said in a statement. “This would mislead customers into thinking they’re getting good value when, in reality, they’re not.”
Amazon can provide feedback to the Cartel Office on its preliminary assessment before it reaches a final decision.
Amazon in 2022 reached a deal with European Union antitrust regulators who were investigating its use of seller data and buy box practices. As part of the settlement, Amazon agreed to display a second buy box on products sold in Europe when there is a second competing offer that’s different on price or delivery.
The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is also probing Amazon’s use of pricing algorithms on its sprawling third-party marketplace as part of a wide-ranging antitrust lawsuit filed in 2023. Amazon has said the FTC’s complaint is “wrong on the facts and the law.”
The case is set to go to trial in October 2026.
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