Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google Inc. said during an event in New Delhi on December 19, 2022.
Sajjad Hussain AFP Getty Images
Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees Monday that the company will need all hands on deck to test new ChatGPT rival Bard. He also said the company would seek help from partners to test APIs that would allow them to access the same underlying technology.
The internal memo comes shortly after Pichai publicly announced Google’s AI-powered chat technology, which will begin rolling out in the coming weeks. Google has faced pressure from investors and employees to compete with ChatGPT, a Microsoft-backed OpenAI chatbot that attracted public attention when it launched late last year.
“Next week, we’ll sign up every Googler to help shape Bard and donate it through special dogfood for the company,” Pichai wrote in an email to employees seen by CNBC. “We look forward to getting all your feedback — in the spirit of our internal hackathon — more details to come.”
Pichai’s note to employees also said search boss Prabhakar Raghavan would “show progress” at an event in Paris later this week.
The internal memo comes shortly after Pichai told the public in a blog post that Bard’s response must be rigorously tested to meet “a high bar for quality, safety, and groundedness in real-world information.”
Last week, CNBC reported that the Alphabet-owned company enlisted employees to prioritize some AI projects as part of a “code red” effort to respond to AI competition, including a chatbot code-named “Apprentice Bard” and a new search feature. Both were confirmed by a company blog post on Monday.
Microsoft is reportedly planning to launch its own version of its Bing search engine that will use ChatGPT to answer users’ search queries. Microsoft held its own event Tuesday with the participation of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.
“It’s early days, we have to deliver and iterate and we have a lot of hard and exciting work ahead of us to build these technologies into our products and continue to bring the best of Google Al to improve people’s lives,” Pichai wrote in a Monday note to employees. “We’ve approached this effort with an intensity and focus that reminds me of early Google – so thank you to everyone who has contributed.”
Pichai also talked about allowing outsiders to create their own applications and products using the same underlying technology, the Language Model for Dialog Applications (or LaMDA), through an API, or application programming interface.
“Next month, we will begin onboarding individual developers, creators and companies, to test the generative language API (application programming interface) initially supported by LaMDA, with several models to follow,” Pichai’s email stated. “Over time, our goal is to create a suite of tools and APIs that will make it easy for others to build more innovative applications with Al.”
A Google spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the internal memo.
