On Tuesday, Google revealed plans to release its own AI chatbot, Bard. Since then, the response to Bard, including a brief demo where it got a basic fact wrong about the James Webb Space Telescope, has caused Google"s parent company Alphabet, to lose over 7 percent of its stock value since Wednesday. As it turns out, it looks like lots of Google employees were less than happy with the reveal of Bard.
CNBC reports that Google staff members have posted on its internal forum Memegen about their feelings on the intrduction to Bard. One staff member directed a message to Google CEO Sundar Pichai, stating, "Dear Sundar, the Bard launch and the layoffs were rushed, botched, and myopic," Another message stated, "Rushing Bard to market in a panic validated the market’s fear about us,”
To be fair, Bard has yet to be released to the general public. That stands in contrast to Microsoft"s decision on Wednesday to launch the new Bing search engine to the public, with chatbot AI tech developed in part by OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT. While it hasn"t come under the same kind of bad reviews as Bard, it"s also not completely flawless either.
For its part, Google is apparently going to "dogfood" the testing of Bard internally at the company before releasing it to the public sometime in the coming weeks. Hopefully, it will emerge as a better AI after all that testing.