Google has been under pressure after it was criticized for slow response in launching a ChatGPT rival product, and then for releasing its AI tool Bard in a rush. Amid the mounting AI pressure, company CEO Sundar Pichai told employees to test the company’s artificial intelligence chat tool for a few hours.
“I know this moment is uncomfortably exciting, and that’s to be expected: the underlying technology is evolving rapidly with so much potential,” CNBC quoted a letter that Sundar Pichai wrote in a company-wide email. The report also added that the top executive asked employees to spend two to four hours of their time on Bard.
Not all products were launched first: Pichai
also told company employees that Google has not always been the first to release a product But it has not been a hurdle in the company's ability to win.
Some of our most successful products were not first to market. They gained momentum because they solved important user needs and were built on deep technical insights, Pichai reportedly wrote in the letter.
Google was comparatively 'late' in launching a web browser. Chrome now has the biggest share in the market. Similarly, before Google launched Android, there were multiple operating systems. But now Android dominates the mobile OS market. It is to be noted that Google wasn't a winner in launching products after others. It launched Allow instant messaging mobile app. But it couldn't make inroads due to the popularity of WhatsApp.
“The most important thing we can do right now is to focus on building a great product and developing it responsibly,” he wrote. Pichai also said that “this will be a long journey for everyone, across the field.”
Earlier this month, Pichai asked “every Googler to help shape Bard and contribute through a special company-wide dog food,” referring to the practice of using its own product before launching it. t’s no wonder they’ve been mocking Bard; even during the Live from Paris livestream event that debuted Google’s LaMDA chatbot-powered AI program, the bot made a key factual error that resulted in a $100 billion drop in the company's market valuation in a single day. Since then, employee-made memes have been calling both the technology and the presentation “rushed, botched, and myopic.”
Bard is now in a rocky place and the tech giant is effectively forcing employees to take time out of their own work schedules to poke and prod at an unpolished AI to get to stop stumbling around so much. Another company-wide email from Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s vice president for search, was seen by CNBC(opens in new tab), which quotes the email as saying: "Bard learns best by example, so taking the time to rewrite a response thoughtfully will go a long way in helping us to improve the mode."
The email goes on to say, “This is exciting technology but still in its early days. We feel a great responsibility to get it right, and your participation in the dogfood will help accelerate the model’s training and test its load capacity (Not to mention, trying out Bard is actually quite fun!).”
The botched announcement of Google Bard AI is ironic considering all the issues Microsoft Bing’s own AI-powered search program has been encountering, like having a breakdown and making things up while throwing tantrums. It remains to be seen how Google Bard will fair but considering how muddled things have already been for it, it has a long way to go to recoup its reputation loss.
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