AI search engines can now chat with us, but glitches abound
Nearly a quarter-century after Google’s search engine began to reshape how we use the internet, big tech companies are racing to revamp a familiar web tool into a gateway to a new form of artificial intelligence.
If it seems like this week’s newly announced AI search chatbots — Google’s Bard, Baidu’s Ernie Bot and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot — are coming out of nowhere, well, even some of their makers seem to think so. The spark rushing them to market was the popularity of ChatGPT, launched late last year by Microsoft’s partner OpenAI and now helping to power a new version of the Bing search engine.
First out of the gate among big tech companies with a publicly accessible search chatbot, Microsoft executives said this week they had been hard at work on the project since last summer. But the excitement around ChatGPT brought new urgency.
“The reception to ChatGPT and how that took off, that was certainly a surprise,” said Yusuf Medhi, the executive leading Microsoft’s consumer division, in an interview. “How rapidly it went mainstream, where everybody’s talking about it, like, in every meeting. That did surprise me.”
How’s this different from ChatGPT?
Millions of people have now tried ChatGPT, using it to write silly poems and songs, compose letters, recipes and marketing campaigns or help write schoolwork. Trained on a huge trove of online writings, from instruction manuals to digitized books, it has a strong command of human language and grammar. But what the newest crop of search chatbots promise that ChatGPT doesn’t have is the immediacy of what can be found in a web search. Ask the preview version
of the new Bing for the latest news — or just what people are talking about on Twitter — and it summarizes a selection of the day’s top stories or trends, with footnotes linking to media outlets or other data sources.
Are they accurate?
Frequently not, and that’s a problem for internet searches. Google’s hasty unveiling of its Bard chatbot this week started with an embarrassing error — first pointed out by Reuters — about NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. But Google’s is not the only AI language model spitting out falsehoods.
The Associated Press asked Bing on Wednesday for the most important thing to happen in sports over the past 24 hours — with the expectation it might say
sider relocating for lifestyle purposes. As of Wednesday, the career board Indeed listed more than 265,000 job openings nationally allowing people to work remotely with no accompanying state residency requirement, versus about 70,500 openings at Connecticut employers.
State Rep. Maria Horn, DSalisbury, told CT Insider she has heard no talk of any potential new tax treatment geared toward remote workers in her role as co-chair of the Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee in the Connecticut General Assembly. But Horn said the topic came up in a committee informational forum last month with the Connecticut Department of Revenue Services in the context of ensuring the state is collecting all taxes due from people who might be exploiting a cross-border working arrangement.
Horn’s district includes swaths of Litchfield County, which saw a surge of home sales during the first years of the COVID-19 pandemic as upper-income New York City workers bought homes outside of the normal commuting orbit.
“The big dollars are obviously in the people who are working whose offices are in either New York or Boston,” Horn said. “But where I live, people also work in Millerton, N.Y. It’s both a big issue and a small issue.”
Last month, in its inaugural ROAM (remote obligations and mobility) index, the National Taxpayers Union Foundation ranked Connecticut 37th among states for the tax environment benefiting remote workers.
Leading the list were nine states that do not levy income taxes, including Florida and New Hampshire, with West Virginia tops among states that do so. In that group with income taxes, Maine and Vermont were highest in the Northeast, ranking 15th and 16th. New Jersey was one rung ahead of Connecticut, with Massachusetts two slots behind and New York near the bottom nationally.
NTUF says that tax rules that once affected relatively small numbers of mobile workers carry more relevance today for larger numbers of industries. The nonprofit cited West Virginia as the only state to achieve high scores in every criteria used for the index.
“Filing and withholding thresholds, they have pretty high marks for those — if you work up to a certain amount of time [there], you can do that without having to file an income tax return, or you can do that without your employer having to withhold taxes on your behalf,” said Andrew Wilford, director of NTUF’s interstate commerce initiative, who authored the report. “A lot of remote workers aren’t just people who go from working in an office to working in their home. A lot of them travel around the country, they are mobile workers — contractors or salespeople.”
Heading into the COVID-19 pandemic, New York already had “convenience of the employer” rules on the books that applied to workers in Connecticut, New Jersey and other border states, forcing them to continue paying New York state income taxes unless workers could prove they had no alternative to remote work. While the closure of their normal workplaces fit that definition alongside child-care needs, once schools and offices reopened, Connecticut workers faced a bigger hurdle in avoiding New York income taxes when working remotely from home.
Connecticut gave any workers impacted by New York’s rule a credit against their Connecticut income taxes. Connecticut has an identical policy on the books levying income taxes on New York residents who work remotely for Connecticut employers. But the Connecticut rule likely has far less of an impact in the aggregate, given the large number of Connecticut commuters who worked in New York City and switched to remote work at the outset of the pandemic.
Attorney General William Tong signed a court brief supporting a New Hampshire effort to get the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn a Massachusetts “convenience of the employer” rules, calling it “of staggering consequence to their fiscal well-being” for states impacted by such policies.
“Labor economists and experts anticipate that after the pandemic ends, the increase in work-from-home arrangements will persist,” Tong and fellow attorneys general from New Jersey, Iowa and Hawaii wrote in the Supreme Court brief filed in December 2020. “It follows that far more taxpayers will be affected by laws that directly tax the income of nonresidents working from home, and that billions of dollars in tax revenue will continue to be at stake.”