Google CEO Sundar Pichai addresses a panel at the CEO Summit of the Americas hosted by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce on June 9, 2022 in Los Angeles, California. The CEO Summit started its second day of events with a formal signing of the “International Coalition to Connect Marine Protected Areas” and a speech by US President Joe Biden. (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
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Google CEO Sundar Pichai on Wednesday urged employees to set aside a few hours during the weekday to test the company’s artificial intelligence chat tool Bard, citing leadership’s slow response to ChatGPT and its rivals Microsoft is criticized.
“I know this moment is uncomfortably exciting, and that’s to be expected: the underlying technology is evolving rapidly with so much potential,” Pichai wrote in a company-wide email seen by CNBC.
Pichai asked employees to spend two to four hours of their time with Bard, adding that the company will send more detailed instructions next week. He reminded employees that Google wasn’t always the first to launch a product, but that hasn’t hurt its chances of success.
“Some of our most successful products weren’t first to market,” Pichai wrote. “They gained momentum because they met key user needs and were based on solid technical insights.”
Search engines were numerous before Google came along in 1996, and yet almost all of them disappeared when Google dominated the industry. In the mobile space, Google didn’t introduce Android until years after the existence of the BlackBerry, and followed with companies like Palm. Now Android is the most popular mobile operating system in the world.
Still, Google parent Alphabet faced criticism from investors last week after the company was eclipsed by Microsoft’s announcement of a ChatGPT-integrated Bing search engine. Google unveiled its conversational technology, Bard, but a series of missteps surrounding the rushed announcement pushed its share price down nearly 9%.
At the time, Pichai issued a rallying cry, urging “every Googler to help shape Bard and contribute through a special company-wide dogfood,” referring to the practice of using their own product before it hits the market. Employees criticized Pichai for the glitches and internally described the rollout as “rushed”, “botched” and “weirdly short-sighted”.
Pichai’s latest email to staff continued, “This is going to be a long journey for everyone, across the field.”
“The most important thing we can do now is focus on building a great product and developing it responsibly,” he wrote. In December, shortly after OpenAI released ChatGPT to the public, Google executives warned that they had to be cautious about introducing AI search tools because the company had far more “reputational risk” and was “more conservative than a small startup.”
Pichai said Wednesday that the company has thousands of people, external and internal, testing Bard’s responses “for quality, certainty, and realism in real-world information.”
“The AI has endured many winters and springs,” Pichai wrote. “And now she’s blossoming again.” He said it was time to “take the challenge and move on.”
“Let the energy and excitement of the moment flow into our products,” Pichai wrote. “Put Bard on the pressure and make the product better.”
REGARD: The full CNBC interview with Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai