NEW YORK  February 1, 2023-

Before the artificial intelligence tool ChatGPT

 was unleashed into the world, the novelist Robin Sloan was testing a similar AI writing assistant built by researchers at Google.

It didn’t take long for Sloan, author of the bestseller “Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore,” to realize that the technology was of little use to him.

“A lot of the state-of-the-art AI right now is impressive enough to really raise your expectations and make you think, ‘Wow, I’m dealing with something really, really capable,’” Sloan said. “But then in a thousand little ways, a million little ways, it ends up kind of disappointing you and betraying the fact that it really has no idea what’s going on.”

Another company might have released the experiment into the wild anyway, as the startup OpenAI did with its ChatGPT tool late last year. But Google has been more cautious about who gets to play with its AI advancements despite growing pressure for the internet giant to compete more aggressively with rival Microsoft, which is pouring billions of dollars into OpenAI and fusing its technology into Microsoft products.

That pressure is starting to take a toll, as Google has asked one of its AI teams to “prioritize working on a response to ChatGPT,” according to an internal memo reported this week by CNBC. Google declined to confirm if there was a public chatbot in the works but spokesperson Lily Lin said it continues “to test our AI technology internally to make sure it’s helpful and safe, and we look forward to sharing more experiences externally soon.”