The New York Times claims ChatGPT set off alarm bells at Google. At the invite of Google CEO Sundar Pichai, the company’s founders – Larry Page and Sergey Brin – returned for a series of meetings to review Google’s AI product strategy.

Google is one of the biggest investors in AI and has some of the most talented minds in the industry. As a result, the company is scrutinised more than most when it comes to any AI developments.

In 2020, leading AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru was fired by Google. Gebru claims she was fired over an unpublished paper and sending an email critical of the company’s practices. Numerous other AI experts at Google left following her firing.

Just two years earlier, over 4,000 Googlers signed a petition demanding that Google cease its plans to develop AI for the US military. Google withdrew from the contract but not before at least a dozen employees resigned.

With the company in the spotlight, Google has allegedly been ultra-cautious in how it develops and deploys AI.

According to a CNBC report, Pichai and Google AI Chief Jeff Dean were asked in a meeting whether ChatGPT represented a “missed opportunity” for the company. Pichai and Dean said that Google’s own models were just as capable but the company had to move “more conservatively than a small startup” because of the “reputational risk” it poses.

Microsoft has invested so heavily in OpenAI that it’s hard to consider the company a small startup anymore. The two companies have established a deep partnership and Microsoft has begun integrating OpenAI’s technologies into its own products.

Earlier this month, AI News reported that Microsoft and OpenAI are set to integrate technology from OpenAI in Bing to challenge Google’s search dominance. That appears to have been what really set off the alarm bells at Google.

Google now appears to be speeding up the reveal and deployment of its own AI solutions. To that end, the company is reportedly working to speed up the review process which checks if it’s operating ethically.

One of the first AI solutions set to debut sounds very similar to what Microsoft and OpenAI have planned for Bing.

A demo of a chatbot-enhanced Google Search is expected at the company’s annual I/O developer conference in May. The demo will prioritise “getting facts right, ensuring safety and getting rid of misinformation.”

Other AI-powered product launches expected to be shown include an image generator, a set of tools for enterprises to develop their own AI prototypes within a browser window, and an app for testing such prototypes.

Google is also said to be working on a rival to GitHub Copilot, a coding assistant powered by OpenAI’s technology. Google’s alternative is called PaLM-Coder 2 and will have a version for building smartphone apps called Colab that will be integrated into Android Studio.

Overall, Google is set to unveil more than 20 AI-powered projects this year. The announcements should calm investors who’ve criticised Google’s slow AI developments in recent years but ethicists will be concerned about the company prioritising speed over safety.

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Relevant: OpenAI CEO: People are ‘begging to be disappointed’ about GPT-4

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Using the feature, developers can “brush” over their code to see it update in real-time.

Several different brushes are included to achieve various aims. For example, one brush makes code more readable—especially important when coding as part of a team or contributing to open-source projects.

Here are the other included brushes:

• Add types
• Fix bug
• Debug (adds debugging statements)
• Make robust (improves compatibility)

Code Brushes also supports the creation of custom brushes. One example is a brush to make a form “more accessible” automatically.

“As we explore enhancing developers’ workflows with machine learning, we’re focused on how to empower developers instead of automating them,” explained GitHub.

“This was one of many explorations we have in the works along those lines.”

Code Brushes is powered by the controversial GitHub Copilot. Copilot uses technology from OpenAI to help generate code and speed up software development.

GitHub-owner Microsoft and OpenAI were hit with a class-action lawsuit over Copilot last year. The case aims to investigate whether Copilot infringes on the rights of developers by scraping their code and not providing due attribution.

“Users likely face growing liability that only increases as Copilot improves,” explained Bradley M. Kuhn of Software Freedom Conservancy earlier this year.

“Users currently have no methods besides serendipity and educated guesses to know whether Copilot’s output is copyrighted by someone else.”

Code Brushes has been added to the Copilot Labs Visual Studio Code extension. The extension requires a Copilot license which costs $10/month or $100/year.

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GitHub Copilot uses technology from OpenAI to help generate code and speed up software development. Microsoft says that it is trained on “billions of lines of public code … written by others.”

Last month, developer and lawyer Matthew Butterick announced that he’d partnered with the Joseph Saveri Law Firm to investigate whether Copilot infringed on the rights of developers by scraping their code and not providing due attribution.

This could unwittingly cause serious legal problems for GitHub Copilot users.

“Copilot leaves copyleft compliance as an exercise for the user. Users likely face growing liability that only increases as Copilot improves,” wrote Bradley M. Kuhn of Software Freedom Conservancy earlier this year.

“Users currently have no methods besides serendipity and educated guesses to know whether Copilot’s output is copyrighted by someone else.”

Copilot is powered by Codex, an AI system created by OpenAI and licensed to Microsoft. Codex currently offers suggestions on how to finish a line but Microsoft has touted its ability to suggest larger blocks of code, like the entire body of a function.

Butterick and litigators from the Joseph Saveri Law Firm have now filed a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI in a US federal court in San Francisco.

In addition to violating attribution requirements of open-source licenses, the claimants allege the defendants have violated:

• GitHub’s own terms of ser­vice and pri­vacy poli­cies;
• DMCA § 1202, which for­bids the removal of copy­right-man­age­ment infor­ma­tion;
• the Cal­i­for­nia Con­sumer Pri­vacy Act;
• and other laws giv­ing rise to related legal claims.

The claimants acknowledge that this is the first step in what will likely be a long journey.

In a post on the claim’s website, Butterick wrote:

“As far as we know, this is the first class-action case in the US chal­leng­ing the train­ing and out­put of AI sys­tems. It will not be the last. AI sys­tems are not exempt from the law. 

Those who cre­ate and oper­ate these sys­tems must remain account­able. If com­pa­nies like Microsoft, GitHub, and OpenAI choose to dis­re­gard the law, they should not expect that we the pub­lic will sit still.

AI needs to be fair & eth­i­cal for every­one. If it’s not, then it can never achieve its vaunted aims of ele­vat­ing human­ity. It will just become another way for the priv­i­leged few to profit from the work of the many.”

AI News will keep you updated on the progress of the lawsuit as it emerges.

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Copilot draws context from the code that a developer is working on and can suggest entire lines or functions. The system, from OpenAI, claims to be “significantly more capable than GPT-3” in generating code and can help even veteran programmers to discover new APIs or ways to solve problems.

Critics claim the system is using copyrighted code that GitHub then plans to charge for:

Julia Reda, a researcher and former MEP, published a blog post arguing that “GitHub Copilot is not infringing your copyright”.

GitHub – and therefore its owner, Microsoft – is using the huge number of repositories it hosts with ‘copyleft’ licenses for its tool. Copyleft allows open-source software or documentation to be modified and distributed back to the community.

Reda argues in her post that clamping down on tools such as GitHub’s through tighter copyright laws would harm copyleft and the benefits it offers.

One commenter isn’t entirely convinced:

“Lots of people have demonstrated that it pretty much regurgitates code verbatim from codebases with abandon. Putting GPL code inside a neural network does not remove the license if the output is the same as the input.

A large portion of what Copilot outputs is already full of copyright/license violations, even without extensions.”

Because the code is machine-generated, Reda also claims that it cannot be determined to be ‘derivative work’ that would face the wrath of intellectual property laws.

“Copyright law has only ever applied to intellectual creations – where there is no creator, there is no work,” says Reda. “This means that machine-generated code like that of GitHub Copilot is not a work under copyright law at all, so it is not a derivative work either.”

There is, of course, also a debate over whether the increasing amounts of machine-generated work should be covered under IP laws. We’ll let you decide your own position on the matter.

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