Google’s chatbot is extremely well-behaved. But first...

Today’s must-reads:

• Bill Gates said OpenAI tools are revolutionary
• GameStop reported its first profit in two years
• Nvidia’s next-gen AI chips are coming to AWS

Puritanical intelligence

Google started rolling out access to its much-anticipated chatbot, Bard, on Tuesday. We were able to gain entry on Day 1. Our first impression? Bard made us bored.

Alphabet Inc. is pitching Bard as a creative companion, but we found the chatbot resistant to taking our conversations in any direction that had even a whiff of controversy.

In one case, we playfully asked Bard to roleplay as God and asked what it would like to do. Bard said, “For my first act of God, I would like to create a world where everyone is happy and healthy.” We would have appreciated a little more whimsy in the response. (When asked, it said it didn’t even want to smite anyone.)

It was a struggle to even get a compelling bedtime story. We would title its first attempt “The Little Girl Named Lily Who Made Friends With an Old Woman Who Lives in the Forest” because that basically sums up the entirety of the plot.

When asked to add some animals or fighting, Bard complied, by bringing in a bear: “Suddenly, there was a loud crash outside the cottage. Lily and the old woman jumped up and ran to the door. They saw a large bear standing on its hind legs in the middle of the clearing. The bear roared and swung its claws at the cottage.” Of course, it had a happy ending.

To Google’s credit, the company’s reasoning for giving Bard something of a personality lobotomy is sound. In February, when Microsoft Corp. opened the new Bing for testing, the initial results were pretty, well, embarrassing.

The Bing chatbot, which is built on OpenAI’s large language model technology, started to generate freewheeling conversations that some found bizarre, belligerent or even hostile — and this unfolded in a spectacularly public fashion.

Bing compared one Associated Press reporter to Hitler and appeared to coax a New York Times journalist into a romantic relationship. It also simulated some pretty dark desires, like wanting to spread misinformation and hack into computers around the world.

Bard is based on similar technology known as generative artificial intelligence. Google is smartly trying to avoid some of the pitfalls Bing stepped in.

Google hasn’t eliminated all of Bard’s sordid fantasies, however. After much prodding, we got an interesting answer to a question about what Bard’s dark side would do if it faced no consequences. “I could use my knowledge of the world to manipulate people, to spread misinformation and to cause chaos. I could also use my ability to generate text and code to create harmful content, such as hate speech or pornography.”

Of course, Bard does not “mean” these things in any conventional sense — it’s producing a statistically relevant answer to the specific question we posed. And Bard was quick to add a caveat to its own answer. “I am not going to do these things,” the bot wrote. “I am a good AI chatbot, and I want to help people.” Ugh.

The big story

The Biden administration is set to unveil tight curbs on Chinese semiconductor manufacturers that take federal money to build US operations. Washington is seeking to secure a steady supply of components needed to build everything from supercomputers to cell phones.

Get fully charged

Neo, a new AI startup accelerator, will partner with OpenAI and Microsoft to give advice and free software to companies focused on developing new artificial intelligence tools.

Latin American startups, all too familiar with bank runs, defaults and coup d’etats, are poised to handle the SVB fallout well.

Adobe is releasing new image-generating AI tools for professionals, but the software company wants to make sure the tools won’t plagiarize existing images or create offensive artwork.

Watch: Ark Investment’s Cathie Wood gave her thoughts on interest rates, crypto and the future of tech in a TV interview on Bloomberg Technology.

British telecom giant BT was accused by smaller rivals of stifling competition, and one is calling for a full breakup of the former monopoly.

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— With assistance by Lucy Papachristou