Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has informed Google employees that “things will go wrong,” as the company races to roll out Bard, its chatbot response to ChatGPT.
Google rolled out Bard for public use on Tuesday, but admitted that it is experimental and a lot of work is still there to be done as it expands access to the AI language model.
“Starting today, people in the US and the UK can sign up at bard.google.com. This is just a first step, and we’ll continue to roll it out to more countries and languages over time,” Pichai said in a memo sent to employees.
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“Even after all this progress, we’re still in the early stages of a long Al journey. As more people start to use Bard and test its capabilities, they’ll surprise us. Things will go wrong. But the user feedback is critical to improving the product and the underlying technology,” he added.
Google’s release of Bard in early February amid ChatGPT 3 frenzy was botched; prompting criticism from the tech giant’s employees who said it was rushed.
“Dear Sundar, the Bard launch and the layoffs were rushed, botched, and myopic. Please return to taking a long-term outlook,” staff said using Google’s Internal Meme Generator.
Google issued several disclaimers in the product, warning that Bard may make mistakes or “give inaccurate or inappropriate responses.”
Pichai said the Bard team has probably spent more time with Bard than anything or anyone else over the past few weeks. He added that 80,000 Googlers have helped test it in the company-wide dog food.
“We should be proud of this work and the years of tech breakthroughs that led us here, including our 2017 Transformer research and foundational models such as PalM and BERT,” he said.
The alphabet chief said Google invited 10,000 trusted testers from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives, as part of its responsible approach to development. He added that “we’ll continue to welcome all the feedback that’s about to come our way. We will learn from it and keep iterating and improving.”
“For now, I’m excited to see how Bard sparks more creativity and curiosity in the people who use it. And I look forward to sharing the full breadth of our progress in Al to help people, businesses and communities as we approach I/O in May,” he said.
Bard is built on a large language model, which is trained on vast troves of online data, helping it to generate compelling responses to user queries.
However, the push to integrate Bard into Google web search services – which was spurred by Microsoft’s decision to onboard ChatGPT 3 into Bing – its web search engine, has been rocky.
Microsoft said it integrated ChatGPT into Bing to wrestle some shares from the digital ad market dominated by Google. The software maker said Bing’s user-base has increased to 100 million since it onboarded ChatGPT 3.