好英语网聊天机器人风潮下，互联网行业的兴奋和混乱
SAN FRANCISCO — When Aaron Levie, the chief executive of Box, tried a new A.I. chatbot called ChatGPT in early December, it didn’t take him long to declare, “We need people on this!”
旧金山——去年12月初，Box的首席执行官亚伦·莱维试用了一款名为ChatGPT的新人工智能聊天机器人，没试多久他就宣布，“我们的人也应该研究这个！”
He cleared his calendar and asked employees to figure out how the technology, which instantly provides comprehensive answers to complex questions, could benefit Box, a cloud computing company that sells services that help businesses manage their online data.
他腾空了日程表，吩咐员工们搞清楚这种立刻给复杂问题提供详尽答案的技术能怎样让Box受益。Box是一家云计算公司，向企业销售帮助它们管理在线数据的服务。
Mr. Levie’s reaction to ChatGPT was typical of the anxiety — and excitement — over Silicon Valley’s new new thing. Chatbots have ignited a scramble to determine whether their technology could upend the economics of the internet, turn today’s powerhouses into has-beens or create the industry’s next giants.
莱维对ChatGPT的反应是那种典型的对硅谷新鲜事物的焦虑和兴奋。这些聊天机器人已引发了一场争夺，人们想知道这种技术是否能颠覆互联网经济，将今天的强手变成过去式，或制造出行业的下一个巨头。
Not since the iPhone has the belief that a new technology could change the industry run so deep. Cloud computing companies are rushing to deliver chatbot tools, even as they worry that the technology will gut other parts of their businesses. E-commerce outfits are dreaming of new ways to sell things. Social media platforms are being flooded with posts written by bots. And publishing companies are fretting that even more dollars will be squeezed out of digital advertising.
自从iPhone出现以来，人们对一项新技术能够改变行业的信念从未如此之深。云计算公司正在迫不及待地提供聊天机器人工具，尽管它们担心这项技术会摧毁它们业务的其他部分。电子商务公司正在梦想新的销售方法。社交媒体平台上充斥着机器人写的帖子。出版公司担心失去更多来自数字广告的收入。
The volatility of chatbots has made it impossible to predict their impact. In one second, the systems impress by fielding a complex request for a five-day itinerary, making Google’s search engine look archaic. A moment later, they disturb by taking conversations in dark directions and launching verbal assaults.
聊天机器人的不稳定行为让人们不可能预测它们的巨大影响。这些系统能在极短的时间里给出一个令人赞叹的、复杂的五天行程，让谷歌的搜索引擎看起来过了时。片刻之后，它们又能将对话带入阴暗方向，对聊天对象进行言语攻击，令人不安。
The result is an industry gripped with the question: What do we do now?
这个技术已让整个行业困扰一个问题：我们现在该做什么？
“Everybody is agitated,” said Erik Brynjolfsson, an economist at Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. “There’s a lot of value to be won or lost.”
“所有的人都焦虑不安，”斯坦福大学以人为本人工智能研究院的经济学家埃里克·布林约尔松说。“这里面有很多价值得失。”
Rarely have so many tech sectors been simultaneously exposed. The A.I. systems could disrupt $100 billion in cloud spending, $500 billion in digital advertising and $5.4 trillion in e-commerce sales, according to totals from IDC, a market research firm, and GroupM, a media agency.
使科技行业的这么多方面同时面临危险的情况很少见。据市场研究公司IDC的预测，去年对云基础设施的投入近1000亿美元；据媒体机构GroupM的预测，去年全球花在数字广告上的金额达5000亿美元，电子商务销售额达5.4万亿美元。新的AI系统可能会扰乱这一切。
Google, perhaps more than any other company, has reason to both love and hate the chatbots. It has declared a “code red” because their abilities could be a blow to its $162 billion business showing ads on searches.
谷歌也许比其他任何公司都更有理由对聊天机器人既爱又恨。谷歌已宣布进入“紧急状态”，因为聊天机器人的能力可能对这家搜索公司1620亿美元的广告业务造成打击。
But Google’s cloud computing business could be a big winner. Smaller companies like Box need help building chatbot tools, so they are turning to the giants that process, store and manage information across the web. Those companies — Google, Microsoft and Amazon — are in a race to provide businesses with the software and substantial computing power behind their A.I. chatbots.
但谷歌的云计算业务也可能是个大赢家。因为像Box这样的小公司在制造聊天机器人工具上需要帮助，它们正在向处理、存储和管理各种网络功能的巨头求助。这些巨头们——谷歌、微软和亚马逊——正在竞相为企业提供它们AI聊天机器人背后的软件和强大计算能力。
“The cloud computing providers have gone all in on A.I. over the last few months,” said Clément Delangue, head of the A.I. company Hugging Face, which helps run open-source projects similar to ChatGPT. “They are realizing that in a few years, most of the spending will be on A.I., so it is important for them to make big bets.”
“云计算供应商们已在过去几个月里全力投入到AI领域，”人工智能公司Hugging Face的负责人克莱芒·德朗格说，他的公司帮助运行类似于ChatGPT的开源项目。“它们意识到，几年后，大部分钱将花在AI上，所以对它们来说，下大赌注很重要。”
When Microsoft introduced a chatbot-equipped Bing search engine last month, Yusuf Mehdi, the head of Bing, said the company was wrestling with how the new version would make money. Advertising will be a major driver, he said, but the company expects fewer ads than traditional search allows.
微软上个月推出带有聊天机器人工具的必应搜索引擎时，必应部门的负责人优素福·梅赫迪曾说，公司正在全力解决新版搜索引擎如何盈利的问题。他说，虽然广告将在这方面起主要作用，但公司预计新平台上的广告数量会少于传统搜索允许的数量。
“We’re going to learn that as we go,” Mr. Mehdi said.
“我们正在边干边学，”梅赫迪说。
As Microsoft figures out a chatbot business model, it is forging ahead with plans to sell the technology to others. It charges $10 a month for a cloud service, built in conjunction with the OpenAI lab, that provides developers with coding suggestions, among other things.
在微软弄清楚聊天机器人商业模式的同时，公司正在拓展将这项技术出售给其他公司的计划。微软对其与OpenAI实验室一起建立的云服务每月收取10美元的费用，这个服务为开发人员提供编码建议和其他一些东西。
Google has similar ambitions for its A.I. technology. After introducing its Bard chatbot last month, the company said its cloud customers would be able to tap into that underlying system for their own businesses.
谷歌对自己的AI技术也有类似的雄心。上个月推出了Bard 聊天机器人后，谷歌说，云端客户将能在开展自己的业务上使用支持该聊天机器人的底层系统。
But Google has not yet begun exploring how to make money from Bard itself, said Dan Taylor, a company vice president of global ads. It considers the technology “experimental,” he said, and is focused on using the so-called large language models that power chatbots to improve traditional search.
但谷歌还没有开始探索如何用Bard本身赚钱，公司负责全球广告业务的副总裁丹·泰勒说。谷歌认为这项技术仍是“实验性的”，他说，公司关注的是将聊天机器人背后使用的所谓大型语言模型用在改进传统搜索上。
“The discourse on A.I. is rather narrow and focused on text and the chat experience,” Mr. Taylor said. “Our vision for search is about understanding information and all its forms: language, images, video, navigating the real world.”
“有关AI的讨论相当狭窄，主要是对文本和聊天体验的讨论，”泰勒说。“我们对搜索的愿景是，搞懂信息及其所有形式——语言、图像、视频、如何处理现实世界。”
Sridhar Ramaswamy, who led Google’s advertising division from 2013 to 2018, said Microsoft and Google recognized that their current search business might not survive. “The wall of ads and sea of blue links is a thing of the past,” said Mr. Ramaswamy, who now runs Neeva, a subscription-based search engine.
曾在2013年到2018年领导谷歌广告部门的斯利达尔·拉马斯瓦米说，微软和谷歌认识到了他们目前的搜索业务也许不复存在。“铺天盖地的广告和蓝色链接的海洋正在成为过去，”拉马斯瓦米说，他现在运营着一个基于订阅的搜索引擎Neeva。
Amazon, which has a larger share of the cloud market than Microsoft and Google combined, has not been as public in its chatbot pursuit as the other two, though it has been working on A.I. technology for years.
亚马逊在云市场的份额比微软和谷歌的加起来还多。尽管亚马逊多年来一直在开发AI技术，但在追求聊天机器人上并不像微软和谷歌那么公开。
But in January, Andy Jassy, Amazon’s chief executive, corresponded with Mr. Delangue of Hugging Face, and weeks later Amazon expanded a partnership to make it easier to offer Hugging Face’s software to customers.
但今年1月，亚马逊首席执行官安迪·贾西与Hugging Face 的德朗格进行了联系，几周后，亚马逊扩大了合作关系，使得向客户提供Hugging Face的软件变得更容易。
As that underlying tech, known as generative A.I., becomes more widely available, it could fuel new ideas in e-commerce. Late last year, Manish Chandra, the chief executive of Poshmark, a popular online secondhand store, found himself daydreaming during a long flight from India about chatbots building profiles of people’s tastes, then recommending and buying clothes or electronics. He imagined grocers instantly fulfilling orders for a recipe.
随着越来越多的公司能使用被称为生成式AI的底层技术，它可能会激发电子商务方面的新想法。去年年底，受欢迎的在线二手商店Poshmark的首席执行官曼尼什·钱德拉在从印度回美国的长途飞行中幻想连篇，他幻想着用聊天机器人对人们的喜好建档，然后推荐衣服或电子产品供他们购买。他幻想着超市把人们按菜谱做菜时需要的食材立刻送上门来。
“It becomes your mini-Amazon,” said Mr. Patel, who has made integrating generative A.I. into Poshmark one of the company’s top priorities over the next three years. “That layer is going to be very powerful and disruptive and start almost a new layer of retail.”
“聊天机器人成了你的迷你亚马逊，”钱德拉说，他已把将生成式AI集成到Poshmark中来作为公司未来三年的首要任务之一。“这个底层将有非常强大的能力，具有颠覆性，差不多能开启一种新的零售模式。”
But generative A.I is causing other headaches. In early December, users of Stack Overflow, a popular social network for computer programmers, began posting substandard coding advice written by ChatGPT. Moderators quickly banned A.I.-generated text.
但生成式AI也在引起其他令人头疼的问题。去年12月初，计算机程序员喜欢用的社交平台Stack Overflow的用户开始发贴提供用ChatGPT编写的不合格的编码建议。管理员很快禁止了在平台上发布用AI生成的文本。
Part of the problem was that people could post this questionable content far faster than they could write posts on their own, said Dennis Soemers, a moderator for the site. “Content generated by ChatGPT looks trustworthy and professional, but often isn’t,” he said.
该平台的管理员丹尼斯·索默斯说，部分问题是，人们能用比自己写帖子快得多的速度发这些有问题的帖子。“ChatGPT 生成的内容看上去可靠且专业，但往往并非如此，”他说。
When websites thrived during the pandemic as traffic from Google surged, Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, a tech news site, warned publishers that the search giant would one day turn off the spigot. He had seen Facebook stop linking out to websites and foresaw Google following suit in a bid to boost its own business.
新冠病毒大流行期间，网站因来自谷歌的流量激增蓬勃发展时，科技新闻网站The Verge的主编尼雷·帕特尔曾警告出版商们，该搜索巨头可能会有朝一日关上水龙头。他已经看到Facebook不再向用户提供通往其他网站的链接，他预见谷歌为促进自己的业务会效仿这种做法。
He predicted that visitors from Google would drop from a third of websites’ traffic to nothing. He called that day “Google zero.”
他预计，目前来自谷歌的访问者将从占网站流量的三分之一降为零。他将那一天称为“谷歌清零”。
“People thought I was crazy,” said Mr. Patel, who redesigned The Verge’s website to protect it. Because chatbots replace website search links with footnotes to answers, he said, many publishers are now asking if his prophecy is coming true.
“人们都认为我疯了，”帕特尔说，他已重新设计了The Verge网站以保护它不受影响。他说，由于聊天机器人将用脚注取代搜索网站提供的链接，许多出版商现在都想知道，他的预言是否正在成真。
For the past two months, strategists and engineers at the digital advertising company CafeMedia have met twice a week to contemplate a future where A.I. chatbots replace search engines and squeeze web traffic.
过去两个月里，数字广告公司CafeMedia的战略师和工程师们每周开两次会，考虑AI聊天机器人取代搜索引擎，挤压网络流量的未来。
The group recently discussed what websites should do if chatbots lift information but send fewer visitors. One possible solution would be to encourage CafeMedia’s network of 4,200 websites to insert code that limited A.I. companies from taking content, a practice currently allowed because it contributes to search rankings.
他们最近讨论的是，当聊天机器人从网站上获取信息，但送到网站的访问者变少时，网站应该怎么办。一个可能的解决方案是鼓励CafeMedia的4200个网络客户安装限制AI公司获取内容的代码，这是目前允许的做法，因为有助于提高搜索排名。
“There are a million things to be worried about,” said Paul Bannister, CafeMedia’s chief strategy officer. “You have to figure out what to prioritize.”
“有很多让人担心的事情，”CafeMedia的首席战略官保罗·班尼斯特说。“必须弄清楚什么是优先事项。”
Courts are expected to be the ultimate arbiter of content ownership. Last month, Getty Images sued Stability AI, the start-up behind the art generator tool Stable Diffusion, accusing it of unlawfully copying millions of images. The Wall Street Journal has said using its articles to train an A.I. system requires a license.
预计法院将成为内容所有权的最终仲裁者。上个月，Getty Images起诉了艺术生成工具Stable Diffusion背后的初创公司Stability AI，指控其非法拷贝了几百万张图片。《华尔街日报》已表示，用该报发表的文章来训练AI系统需要获得其许可。
In the meantime, A.I. companies continue collecting information across the web under the “fair use” doctrine, which permits limited use of material without permission.
与此同时，AI公司们继续按照“合理使用”原则在网络上收集信息，这个原则允许在未经许可的情况下有限地使用搜集来的材料。
“The world is facing a new technology, and the law is groping to find ways of dealing with it,” said Bradley J. Hulbert, a lawyer who specializes in this area. “No one knows where the courts will draw the lines.”
“一项新技术已降临世界，法律正在摸索应对它的方法，”专门从事该领域的律师布拉德利·赫尔伯特说。“没有人知道法院会把界限划在哪里。”