AI search engines can now chat with us, but glitches abound

By MATT O’BRIEN
AP Technology Writer

REDMOND, Wash. (AP) — Nearly a quarter-century after Google’s search engine began to reshape how we use the internet, big tech companies are racing to revamp a familiar web tool into a gateway to a new form of artificial intelligence. This week saw several newly announced AI search chatbots — Google’s Bard, Baidu’s Ernie Bot and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot. The spark rushing them to market was the popularity of ChatGPT, launched late last year by Microsoft’s partner OpenAI and now helping to power a new version of the Bing search engine. But glitches abound, including inaccurate answers and a phenomenon known as AI “hallucination” that’s common with today’s large language-learning models.