Google is feeling the heat—from its employees. With Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered Bing making waves and Google’s answer, Bard, suffering a “demoralizing” demo last month, workers want to know their game plan with artificial intelligence and search.
In an all-hands meeting on Friday, Google workers had the opportunity to pepper CEO Sundar Pichai and Bard product leader Jack Krawczyk with questions, according to CNBC, which said it obtained audio from the meeting.
One worker asked the following question via Google’s internal Dory forum, according to CNBC:
“Bard and ChatGPT are big language models, not knowledge models. They are very good at generating text that sounds human, they are not good at making sure the text is based on reality. Why do we think that the first big application is Search, the most important thing is find the right information?
Krawczyk, making his all-hands debut, quickly replied, “I just want to be very clear: Bard is not looking.”
Instead, he says, it’s a “collaborative AI service.”
“The magic we find using these products is really this creative companion to help you be the spark plug for your imagination, explore your curiosity, etc.,” he said. However, he added, “We can’t prevent users from trying to use it like search.”
Of course, search is very much on the minds of investors and Google employees. When OpenAI showed its AI chatbot ChatGPT to the public in late November, thoughts immediately turned to how the technology could disrupt Google’s search dominance.
Fears about this were hardly dispelled when Microsoft launched a ChatGPT-powered rival to Google search last month. (Currently available to a limited number of users, but will be available to more.)
Google responded last month with a Bard demo video, but it failed due to a factual error from its chatbot about the James Webb Space Telescope. Wall Street immediately condemned Alphabet’s parent Google, sending its stock plummeting.
Another question on Thursday was about the demo, according to CNBC, with employees asking, “The first public demo was demoralizing, sent our stock into a nosedive, and invited massive media coverage. What really happened?”
“A question like this can be fair and we want to reiterate the fact that Bard hasn’t been launched yet,” Krawczyk replied. “We admit to the world that this is an experiment – we’re trying. But there’s a lot of excitement in the industry right now.
Another employee reportedly commented, “Launching AI seems like a knee-jerk reaction without a strategy.”
“I don’t agree with the premise of this question,” Pichai responded, noting that Google has been “making AI for a long time.”
Indeed, OpenAI was founded in 2015 “as a counterweight to Google” in AI, Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who helped start it, tweeted last month. He also complained that OpenAI has “become a closed-source, profit-maximizing company controlled by Microsoft.” (Musk is now reportedly working on a rival with OpenAI.)
But Google, although it has long been strong at the forefront of AI research, has more to lose than anyone else if users start Googling less and turn to other AI chatbots for their search queries.
Google did not immediately respond fortunerequest for comments.
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