Engineers built AI chat bots several years ago, and Google has been obstructing artificial intelligence efforts.

It is reported that a few years ago, a former Google engineer developed a conversational AI chat robot.

But for security reasons, Google executives blocked their efforts to release it to the public.

Google is now catching up with Microsoft’s artificial intelligence and plans to release its artificial intelligence chat bot this year.

Google is expected to release Bard, a highly anticipated AI chat robot, in the near future. But according to a recent report, a few years ago, two former Google engineers urged their former employers to release a similar chat robot to the public, and they met with resistance.

According to former colleagues, around 2018, Daniel de Freitas, a Google research engineer, began to work on artificial intelligence projects, with the goal of creating a dialogue and chat robot that imitates human speech. Noam Shazeer is a software engineer in Google’s artificial intelligence research department and later joined the project.

De Freitas and Chazel can build a chat robot, which they call Meena. They can discuss philosophy, talk about TV programs at will and make puns about horses and cows. They believe Meena can fundamentally change the way people search online.

However, Google executives said that the chat bot did not comply with its artificial intelligence safety and fairness standards, and they renamed it LaMDA, which will become the language model behind Budd. Executives have repeatedly tried to send robots to external researchers, add chat functions to Google Assistant, and release demonstrations to the public.

Although CEO Sandahl Picha personally asked them to stay and continue to develop chatbot, Defree Tass and Chazel were disappointed with the response of the executives and left Google at the end of 2021 to start their own company. Their company is now called Character.Ai, and since then it has released a chat robot, which can play characters such as elon musk or Mario of Nintendo.

Since 2012, Google has been obstructing its artificial intelligence efforts, and it is nothing new for Google to hesitate to release its artificial intelligence tools.

It is reported that in 2012, Google hired computer scientist ray kurzweil to study its language processing model. According to TechCrunch, about a year later, Google acquired DeepMind, a British artificial intelligence company, which aims to create artificial general intelligence.

However, due to moral concerns about large-scale monitoring, academics and technical experts refused to use the technology, and Google promised to limit the way it uses artificial intelligence. In 2018, Google terminated its project of using artificial intelligence technology for military weapons in response to employee opposition.

But Google’s artificial intelligence plan may finally have a dawn now, although the discussion about whether its chat bot can be launched responsibly continues. Bard, the company’s chat bot, will be launched after Microsoft releases its own chat bot through Bing, and Microsoft’s stock is rising.

Last month, Google’s Bard chat bot made a factual error in its first public demonstration, and Google employees quickly called the announcement "hasty" and "clumsy". John Hennessy, chairman of Alphabet, agrees that Google’s chat bots are "not really ready to launch products".