The unprecedented failure of Google Bard at its launch triggered severe reactions from the tech community, including Google’s own employees.
A report by CNBC stated that Google employees criticized Sundar Pichai in their company’s internal message boards, calling Bard’s launch rushed and botched. Some have even criticized the company’s recent move of ditching 12,000 employees.
The Grand Mistake That Costed Billions
Triggered by the partnership between Microsoft and ChatGPT maker OpenAI, Google introduced its own AI chatbot named Bard earlier this week. While it’s hoped to counter Microsoft’s new Bing Search, Bard utterly failed at launch with a wrong example!
In the demo, Google Bard was asked about new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope – to which the chatbot replied with three bullet points, including a statement that the telescope “took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system.”
Well, this was wrong, as the first pictures of Earth were taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004. Some experts have quickly jumped to criticize these results, with one astrophysicist named Grant Tremblay tweeting that – AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard tend to state incorrect information confidently.
They’re trained on massive datasets to analyze patterns to determine word sequences but don’t actually query a database of proven facts. This leads them to “hallucinate” and create false information.
This had a strong impact on the company, with Alphabet’s shares sliding as much as 9% during the regular trading span. Some Google employees have criticized the company’s technology as “rushed,” “botched,” and “un-Googley,” as per CNBC, which viewed some of the messages in Google’s internal forum “Memegen“.
One worker made a meme featuring a photo of Pichai looking serious with the caption, “Dear Sundar, the Bard launch and the layoffs were rushed, botched, and myopic. Please return to taking a long-term outlook.” While another said, “Rushing Bard to market in a panic validated the market’s fear about us.”
