A top AI researcher reportedly left Google for OpenAI after sharing concerns the company was training Bard on ChatGPT data

• A top Google researcher resigned after warning execs that Bard was trained off ChatGPT, per The Information.
• A Google spokesperson told The Verge that Bard is not trained on data from ChatGPT.

Top Google AI researcher Jacob Devlin resigned earlier this year after he warned Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai and other top executives that the company's ChatGPT competitor, Bard, was being trained on data from OpenAI's chatbot, according to a recent report from The Information.

The publication cited a source with direct knowledge of the issue, as well as another individual who had been briefed on it. Spokespeople for Google and OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment ahead of publication. But a spokesperson for Google appeared to deny the report in a comment to The Verge.

"Bard is not trained on any data from ShareGPT or ChatGPT," the spokesperson told The Verge.

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According to The Information, Devlin told the executives that he believed the team working on Bard was using information from ShareGPT, a platform on which users publish exchanges they've had with ChatGPT. The publication said that Devlin warned executives that by training on ChatGPT conversations, Bard could end up sounding too similar to OpenAI's chatbot.

The researcher, as well as other Google staff, also felt that it was a violation of OpenAI's terms of services, according to The Information.

One person told The Information that Google stopped using the data to train Bard after Devlin warned executives about the issue.

Shortly after leaving Google in January, Devlin joined OpenAI. Insider previously reported that Devlin was one of several AI researchers to leave Google at the beginning of the year for competitors.

Devlin, who was at Google for over five years, was the lead author of a 2018 research paper on training machine learning models for search accuracy that helped initiate the AI boom. His research has since become a part of both Google and OpenAI's language models, Insider and The Information reported.

OpenAI has hired dozens of former Alphabet staff over the years. Since the company's chatbot made headlines in November for its ability to do anything from write an essay to provide basic code, Google and OpenAI have been locked in an AI arms race.

Earlier this month, Google released Bard to a select group of users in the US and UK. But Google's haste to catch up with OpenAI hasn't stopped there. The Information reported that Alphabet's two AI teams, DeepMind and Google Brain, have joined forces to better compete with OpenAI.

Read The Information's full story on its website.

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