Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, speaks at the Business, Government and Society 2024 forum in Stanford, California, April 3, 2024.
Loren Elliott | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai says Google will ‘fix the problem’ if it determines MicrosoftBacked by OpenAI, it relied on YouTube content to train an artificial intelligence model capable of generating videos.
The comments, in an interview with CNBC’s Deirdre Bosa on Tuesday, come after OpenAI chief technology officer Mira Murati told the Wall Street Journal in March that she wasn’t sure if YouTube videos were part of the data. training for the company’s Sora model introduced earlier in the year.
Murati said OpenAI relied on publicly available data and licensed data. The New York Times later reported that OpenAI had transcribed more than a million hours of YouTube videos.
When asked whether Google would sue OpenAI if the startup violated the search company’s terms of service, Pichai did not provide details.
“Look, I think that’s a question they need to answer,” Pichai said. “I don’t have anything to add. We have clear terms of service. And so, you know, I think normally in these areas we engage with the companies and make sure they understand our terms of service. And We’ll sort it out outside.”
Pichai said Google has processes in place to determine whether OpenAI is violating the rules. Newspapers such as the New York Times have previously targeted OpenAI for allegedly violating copyright law and training models on their articles.
Pichai’s interview followed a speech to developers at Google’s I/O conference, where executives announced new AI models, including one called Veo, capable of compositing synthetic videos . Those who want early access will need to receive approval from Google.
OpenAI preempted the Google event on Monday. The company revealed an AI model called GPT-4o and showed how users of its ChatGPT mobile app would be able to hold realistic voice conversations, by interrupting the AI assistant and making it analyze what appears on camera of a smartphone. On Tuesday, Google showed off similar upcoming features.
“I don’t think they’ve sent their demo to their users yet,” Pichai said of OpenAI. “I don’t think it’s available in the product.”
OpenAI said in a blog post on Monday that customers of its ChatGPT Plus subscriptions will be able to try an early version of the new voice mode in the coming weeks. Pichai said the media chat capabilities of Google’s Project Astra would be integrated into its Gemini chatbot later this year.
“We have a clear idea of how to approach it and we will succeed,” Pichai said.
Google has reduced the cost of serving AI models in web searches by 80% since previewing it last year, leveraging its custom tensor processing units (TPUs) and from Nvidia popular graphics processing units, he said. Google said during the keynote that it was starting to show its AI previews in search results for all users in the United States.
In June, Apple will hold its Worldwide Developers Conference in Cupertino, California. Bloomberg reported in March that Apple was discussing the idea of adding Gemini to the iPhone. Pichai told Bosa that Google has enjoyed “a great partnership with Apple over the years.” A Google expert witness testified in court last November that the company gave Apple 36% of its search advertising revenue from the Safari browser.
“We have been focused on delivering exceptional experiences to the Apple ecosystem,” Pichai said. “This is something we take very seriously and I believe in it: we have many ways to ensure our products are accessible. We see that AI previews are a popular feature today on iOS when we tested them, and so we will continue – including Gemini, we will continue to work towards achieving that.
WATCH: Alphabet CEO Talks GPT-4-Trained OpenAI Report on YouTube: We Have Clear Terms of Service
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