Pichai-led tech major Google announced its experimental conversational artificial intelligence chatbot service Bard earlier this month.
In an intensifying AI race, the chief executive officer of Google – Sundar Pichai – has reportedly urged employees to spend more time testing the company’s AI chatbot – Bard. According to a report by Business Insider, citing an internal memo to the company’s employees, Pichai asked Googlers to contribute two-to-four hours of their time this week to help improve Bard, Google’s answer to Microsoft-backed ChatGPT.
According to the report, the American multinational tech giant has begun Bard’s “dogfooding,” a practice of testing and using a newly developed product or service by the staff of the company before making it available to the customers. Google’s AI chatbot already has thousands of internal and external testers using it and submitting their feedback regarding the quality, safety, and groundedness of its responses.
The media report further highlighted that the reviewed mail indicates a sense of urgency at Google to lead the next generation of AI-based search. The move comes after the company suffered reputational damage and lost about $100 billion in market value due to Bard’s one mistake.
The mistake, in particular, was that Bard provided incorrect information about the James Webb Space Telescope being the first to take pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system. However, it was discovered by the Very Large Telescope in Chile in 2004, not by James Webb. As a result, Google shares took a significant hit, with its market cap decreasing from $1.35 trillion last week to $1.27 trillion and wiping $100 billion in market value.
Earlier this month, Pichai-led tech major Google announced its experimental conversational artificial intelligence chatbot service Bard as competition to Microsoft-backed ChatGPT which recently exploded in popularity. Short for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, ChatGPT is a popular AI text generator and has been a center of attention for many due to its human-like response. Google’s rival Microsoft has a “multibillion dollar investment” in OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT.
