Google denies Bard was trained with ChatGPT data

Google denies Bard was trained with ChatGPT data

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Google’s Bard hasn’t exactly had an impressive debut — and The Information is reporting that the company is so interested in changing the fortunes of its AI chatbots, it’s forcing its DeepMind division to help the Google Brain team beat OpenAI with a new initiative called Gemini. The Information’s report also contains the potentially staggering thirdhand allegation that Google stooped so low as to train Bard using data from OpenAI’s ChatGPT, scraped from a website called ShareGPT.

But Google is firmly and clearly denying that: “Bard is not trained on any data from ShareGPT or ChatGPT,” spokesperson Chris Pappas tells The Verge.

NEW: Prominent Google AI researcher resigned after warning Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and other senior execs that Bard—Google’s rival to ChatGPT—was *using data from ChatGPT*.

Big no-no in that world. https://t.co/a5NeclJPK5 w/ @jon_victor_ pic.twitter.com/YEZqEqpzPS

— Amir Efrati (@amir) March 29, 2023

According to The Information’s reporting, a Google AI engineer named Jacob Devlin left Google to immediately join its rival OpenAI after attempting to warn Google not to use ChatGPT data because it would violate OpenAI’s terms of service, and that its answers would look too similar. One source told the publication that Google stopped using that data after his warnings. Perhaps it threw out that portion of the training, too.

Regardless of whether Google did or didn’t wind up using the data, it’s interesting to hear that Google might be pulling in DeepMind, which has been trying and failing to become more independent from Google for many years.