Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google Inc., speaks on the Google I/O Developers Conference in Mountain View, California, U.S., Tuesday, May 8, 2018.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty’s paintings
Google management continues to be coping with the aftermath of last month’s botched announcement of the corporate’s Bard AI engine, but their efforts to wash up the mess are causing further confusion amongst employees.
At Thursday’s meeting, executives answered questions from Dora, the corporate’s internal forum, with many of the top-rated issues pertaining to priorities around Bard, based on audio obtained by CNBC. That is the primary company-wide meeting since then Google employees criticized management, specifically CEO Sundar Pichai, for the way in which they handled Bard’s announcement, a Google ChatGPT competitor.
Wall Street has punished Alphabet, Google’s parent for introducing Bard, downgrading shares amid fears the corporate’s primary search engine is in peril of being displaced as consumers find yourself turning to AI-powered responses that allow for more conversational and inventive responses. Employees called Google’s first public presentation “rushed”, “failed” and “non-Google”.
Jack Krawczyk, Bard’s product leader, debuted Thursday and answered the next query from Dory, which was watched by CNBC.
“Bard and ChatGPT are big language models, not knowledge models. They’re great at generating text that sounds human, but they don’t seem to be good at ensuring that their text is factual. Why do we predict that the primary big application needs to be a search engine, which at its core is about finding real information?”
Krawczyk responded immediately by saying, “I just need to make it very clear: Bard just isn’t a search engine.”
“It’s an experiment that is a shared AI service that we talked about,” Krawczyk said. “The magic we discover in using the product is to be that creative companion that helps you be the spark plug for your imagination, explore your curiosity, etc.”
But Krawczyk was quick so as to add, saying “we won’t stop users from attempting to use it like search.”
He said Google still supports individuals who need to use it for search, declaring that the corporate has built a latest feature for internal use called “Search”.
“We are going to try to raised generate queries related there, in addition to convey our trust to users,” said Krawczyk. He added that users would see a tab that said “view other drafts”, which might distract people from search-like results.
“But when you should take search-oriented journeys, we have already got a product for that – it’s called search,” he said.
Bard’s try to separate from the search appeared to mark a turnaround within the initial strategy, based on what staffers told CNBC and internal memes that had been circulating in recent weeks. Within the run-up to Bard’s announcement, Google executives had repeatedly said that the technology they were developing internally could integrate with search.
Several Google employees, who asked to stay anonymous because they weren’t authorized to talk on the matter, told CNBC that management’s inconsistent responses had led to more confusion.
Elizabeth Reid, vp of search engineering, echoed Krawczyk’s comments on Thursday, specializing in the corporate’s extensive use of enormous language models (LLMs).
“Like Jack said, Bard is basically separate from search,” Reid said. “We have now quite a protracted history of introducing LLM to go looking,” she said, citing models named Bert and Mom.
But while the corporate is experimenting with LLM, it desires to “keep the core of what search is all about,” Reid said.
Google’s announcement last month mentioned search several times.
“We’re working to bring the newest AI enhancements to our products, starting with search,” the corporate said post on a blog.
That very same week, at a search event in Paris, Google’s head of search, Prabhakar Raghavan, introduced some latest examples of how Barda is getting used. After this announcement, company leaders called on all employees to assist, spending several hours testing Bard and rewriting the incorrect answers, citing “a fantastic responsibility to get it right.”
CNBC also previously reported that the corporate was testing various search page designs integrated with Bard.
One other top-rated query from Pichai on Thursday involved various Bard use cases, as Google employees were asked to assist with searches and “rewrite queries with factual information.”
“It is important to acknowledge that that is an experiment,” Pichai said in his response. “It is very vital to pay attention to the restrictions of those products.” These limitations are something he has handled up to now.
Pichai said with Bard, “you are exposing users to the power to seek advice from the LLM,” which is able to improve over time. “And in fact we’re at the highest of product engineering,” he said.
“Products like this recover the more people use them,” said Pichai. “It is a virtuous cycle.”
“It’s an intense time”
Following Google’s launch of Bard in February, Alphabet’s share price fell nearly 9%, suggesting investors were hoping for more in light of accelerating competition from Microsoft, which is a giant investor in ChatGPT developer OpenAI.
Employees know perfectly well how the introduction was received.
“The primary public demonstration was demoralizing, caused our stock to plummet and generated massive media attention,” reads a Dora worker comment read aloud. Then the query arose: “What really happened?” and a request to “share your honest thoughts on what went incorrect with Bard’s launch.”
Pichai addressed Krawczyk’s response, who danced around the subject without giving a direct answer.
“Questions like this may be fair, and we would like to reiterate the actual fact that Bard didn’t take off,” Krawczyk said. “We have confirmed to the world that that is something we’re experimenting with – we’re testing it. But there’s quite a lot of excitement within the industry straight away.”
Krawczyk also referred to the event that took place at Microsoft headquarters this week, where the corporate showed off how OpenAI technology can power Bing search results and other products.
“You see, the ChatGPT stories coincide with an event that was actually focused on search,” Krawczyk said. “There could also be external perception challenges, but as you heard today, we’re still specializing in the Bard tests.”
Krawczyk added that Google is happy to place the technology “into the hands of users to capture their creativity.”
Pichai chimed in, saying, “It’s an intense time.”
“The purpose of the blog post was that when we decided we were going to go to third-party trusted testers, things could leak and it was vital for us to position that,” Pichai said. “We have not launched the product yet. And in fact, when we launch it, we’ll explain that it’s an experimental product.”
Pichai said the corporate hopes to offer more details after Google IO, its annual developer conference. Google has not yet announced the date of the event.
One other top-rated comment from Dora’s worker was, “Running AI looks like a knee-jerk response with no strategy.”
Pichai began his response by saying that Google spends more cash on AI research and development than every other company.
“I do not agree with the premise of this query,” he said, laughing. “We have now been working intensively on artificial intelligence for a protracted time. You are right within the sense that we’d like to concentrate on the users and be sure we construct things that have an effect.” He said: “User input might be a crucial a part of the method, so it is important to get it right.”
Jeff Dean, head of artificial intelligence at Google LLC, speaks on the Google AI event in San Francisco, California, U.S., Tuesday, January 28, 2020.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty’s paintings
Jeff Dean, Google’s head of AI, was called in by Pichai at an all-employee meeting to reply a matter in regards to the company’s lack of top talent. Specifically, the query was asked why Google lost so many key individuals who were mentioned within the article on the outstanding architecture utilized in artificial intelligence.
“I believe it is important to understand that it is a very competitive field,” said Dean. “Individuals with these sorts of skills are in high demand.”
Dean said Google has “two of the very best AI research teams on this planet” and “people working side by side to advance AI.”
Despite the competition out there, “we have now the chance to feature things within the newspapers here, but we also work on products that affect hundreds of thousands of users each day,” said Dean.
Pichai added that “over the past few weeks, we have been talking to some individuals who want to affix Google who are actually a few of the very best ML researchers and engineers on this planet.”
A Google spokesperson didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
TO WATCH: Due to chatbot technology, Google can gain a bonus as a second player