Google execs say in all-hands meeting Bard A.I. isn’t all for search

Google executives continue to deal with the fallout from last month’s fumbled announcement of the company’s artificial intelligence machine called Bard, but efforts to clean up the mess have caused confusion among the workforce.

In an all-hands meeting Thursday, executives answered questions from Dory, the company’s internal forum, with most of the top issues related to priorities surrounding Bard, according to audio obtained by CNBC. It was the first company meeting since Google employees criticized the leadership, especially CEO Sundar Pichai, for the way they handled the announcement of Bard, Google’s ChatGPT competitor.

Wall Street has condemned Alphabet’s parent Google for the Bard rollout, forcing shares down amid concerns that the company’s core search engine is at risk of being displaced as consumers finally turn to AI-powered responses that allow for more conversational and creative answers. Staff called Google’s initial public presentation “rushed,” “botched” and “un-Googley.”

Jack Krawczyk, product lead for Bard, made his all-hands debut on Thursday, and answered the following questions from Dory, as reviewed by CNBC.

“Bard and ChatGPT are great language models, not knowledge models. They are good at producing text that sounds human, not good at making sure the text is based on reality. Why do we think the first big application should be Search, which at its heart is finding the right information ?”

Krawczyk responded directly saying, “I just want to be very clear: Bard is not looking.”

“It’s an experiment that is a collaborative AI service that we’re talking about,” Krawczyk said. “The magic we find when using these products is really this creative companion to help you become a sparkplug for your imagination, explore your curiosity, etc.”

But Krawczyk was quick to follow up by saying, “we can’t prevent users from trying to use it like search.”

He said Google is still catering to those who want to use it for search, indicating that the company has built a new feature for internal use called “Search It.”

“We will try better to generate relevant queries, as well as give users confidence,” said Krawczyk. He added that users will see a tab that says “see more drafts,” which will redirect people away from search results.

“However you want to get into more search-oriented travel, we already have a product for that — it’s called search,” he said.

The effort to separate Bard from search appears to be a pivot in the initial strategy, based on what CNBC employees have said and on internal memes that have circulated in recent weeks. In the lead up to Bard’s announcement, Google executives repeatedly said that internally developed technology would integrate with search.

Several Google employees, who asked not to be named because they were not authorized to speak on the matter, told CNBC that inconsistent answers from executives led to greater confusion.

Elizabeth Reid, vice president of engineering for search, echoed Krawczyk’s comments on Thursday, focusing on the company’s use of large language models (LLMs).

“As Jack said, Bard is really separate from the search,” Reid said. “We have quite a long history of bringing LLMs to the search,” he said, referring to models named Bert and Mum.

But as companies experiment with LLMs, they want to “keep the heart of what they’re looking for,” Reid said.

In Google’s announcement last month, they mentioned search several times.

“We’re working on these latest AI advances into our products, starting with Search,” the company said in a blog post.

That same week, at an event in Paris, Google search chief Prabhakar Raghavan revealed some new examples of using Bard in search. And after the announcement, the company’s leaders asked all employees to help by spending a few hours to try Bard and rewrite the wrong answers, calling it “a big responsibility to solve.”

CNBC also previously reported that the company is testing different search page designs that Bard has integrated.

Another top question asked Pichai for a different use case for Bard, as Google employees were asked to help search and “to rewrite queries with factual information.”

“It’s important to acknowledge that it’s an experiment,” Pichai said in his response. “It’s important to acknowledge the product’s limitations as well.” The limitation is something that has been done before.

Pichai said that with Bard, “you open up the ability for users to talk to LLM,” which will increase over time. “And obviously we are the product engineering at the top,” he said.

“Products like this get better the more people use them,” Pichai said. “It’s a virtuous cycle.”

After the launch of Google Bard in February, Alphabet’s share price fell almost 9%, indicating that investors were expecting more due to increased competition from Microsoft, which is a big investor in ChatGPT creator OpenAI.

Employees also know how to receive introductions.

“This first public demo was demoralizing, sent our stock into a nosedive, and invited massive media coverage,” read employee comments from Dory read aloud. Then comes the question, “What really happened?” and a request to “please share your honest thoughts on what went wrong with Bard’s launch.”

Pichai cited Krawczyk’s answer, which danced around the subject without giving a direct answer.

“Questions like this can be fair and we want to reiterate the fact that Bard has not been released,” said Krawczyk. But there is a lot of excitement in the industry today.

Krawczyk also referred to events held at Microsoft’s headquarters that week, where the company demonstrated how OpenAI technology can power Bing search results and other products.

“You see the ChatGPT story coincides with the events that we’re having that really focus on search,” Krawczyk said. “There are challenges in terms of external perception but, as you heard today, we continue to focus on the Bard test.”

Krawczyk added that Google is excited to get the technology “in the hands of users to capture their creativity.”

Pichai chimed in, “It’s a powerful moment.”

“The point of the blog post is that if we decide to go to an external trusted tester, things can leak and it’s important that we position them,” Pichai said. “We haven’t launched the product yet. And obviously when we launch, we’ll make it clear that it’s an experimental product.”

Pichai said the company hopes to provide more details after Google IO, its annual developer conference. Google has not announced the date of the event.

Another top employee comment from Dory said, “Launching AI seems like a knee-jerk reaction without a strategy.”

Pichai began his response by noting that Google spends more money on AI research and development than any other company.

“I disagree with the premise of this question,” he said, laughing. “We’ve been working on AI for a long time. You’re right, we need to stay focused on the user and make sure we’re building things that have an impact.”

Jeff Dean, Google’s AI chief, was summoned by Pichai at an all-hands meeting to answer questions about the company’s loss of top talent. Specifically, the question asked why Google lost many of the key people listed in the paper about the many AI technologies behind Bard.

“I think it’s important to understand that this is a very competitive field,” Dean said.

Dean said Google has “two of the best AI research teams in the world” and “people working together to advance the art of AI.”

Despite the competition in the market, “we have the ability to put things in the newspaper here but also work on products that touch millions of users every day,” said Dean.

Pichai added, “Over the past few weeks, we’ve been talking to a number of people who want to join Google who are truly the best ML researchers and engineers on the planet.”

A Google spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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