Google execs said in the meeting Bard AI is not all for search

Google executives are continuing to deal with the fallout from last month clumsy announced the company’s artificial intelligence tool Bard, but their efforts to clean up the mess are adding to the confusion of the workforce.

In a hands-on meeting on Thursday, executives answered questions from Dory, the company’s internal forum, with most of the top-rated issues related to priorities. around Bard, according to audio obtained by CNBC. This is the first company-wide meeting since Google employees criticize leadership, most notably the CEO Sundar Pichaifor how it handles notifications of BardGoogle’s ChatGPT competitor.

Wall Street has chastised Alphabet, Google’s parent company for its implementation of Bard, pushing its stock price lower over concerns that the company’s core search engine is at risk of being displaced as end consumers. switching to AI-powered responses allows for more creative and conversational responses. Employees called Google’s initial public presentation “rushed,” “unsuccessful,” and “not Google’s.”

Jack Krawczyk, Bard’s product lead, launched it all on Thursday and answered the following question from Dory, seen by CNBC.

“Bard and ChatGPT are big language models, not knowledge models. They’re good at making text sound like humans, but not so good at making sure their text is fact-based. At Why do we think the first big app should be Search, why is the heart of it really searching for information?

Krawczyk responded by saying immediately, “I just wanted to make it clear: Bard is not a search.”

“It was an experiment that was a collaborative AI service that we talked about,” says Krawczyk. “The magic we found in using the product really lies in being this creative companion to help you become the one who sparks your imagination, explores your curiosity, etc.”

But Krawczyk was quick to respond by saying, “we can’t stop users from trying to use it as search.”

He said Google is still serving people who want to use it to search, suggesting the company has built a new feature for internal use called “Search It”.

“We will try to get better at generating relevant queries there, as well as instilling our confidence in our users,” said Krawczyk. He added that users will see a tab that says “see other drafts,” which will steer people away from search-like results.

“But when you want to get more involved in journeys towards search, we’ve got a product for that — it’s called search,” he says.

The effort to separate Bard from search appears to represent a pivot in the original strategy, based on what employees told CNBC and on internal memes circulating in recent weeks. Prior to Bard’s announcement, Google executives had repeatedly said that the technology they were developing internally would integrate with search.

Several Google employees, who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak on the matter, told CNBC that inconsistent responses from executives had led to greater confusion.

Elizabeth Reid, vice president of search engineering, echoed Krawczyk’s comments on Thursday, focusing on the company’s widespread use of large language models (LLMs).

“As Jack said, Bard is really separate from search,” says Reid.

But while experimenting with LLM, the company wanted to “keep the core of search,” Reid said.

In Google’s announcement last month, it mentioned search multiple times.

“We are working to bring these latest AI advancements to our products, starting with Search,” the company said in a statement. a blog post.

That same week, at an event in Paris, Google search mogul Prabhakar Raghavan disclosure some new examples of using Bard in search. And after the announcement, company leaders urge all staff to help by spending a few hours checking on Bard and rewrite wrong answer, citing a “great responsibility to make it right.”

CNBC previously also report the company is testing multiple Bard-integrated homepage search page designs.

Another top-rated question on Thursday asked Pichai about different use cases for Bard, as Googlers were asked to help with searches and “rewrite queries with factual information.” .”

“It’s important to acknowledge that it’s experimental,” Pichai said in his answer. “Acknowledging the limitations of these products is also extremely important.” Those limitations are something that he has dealt with in the past.

Pichai says that with Bard, “you’re giving users the ability to chat with the LLM,” which should improve over time. “And obviously we’re product engineering first,” he says.

“Products like this get better the more people use them,” says Pichai. “It’s a virtuous cycle.”

After Google launched Bard in February, Alphabet stock price drops nearly 9%shows that investors are hoping for more due to increasing competition from Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT.

Staff are well aware of how referrals have been received.

“The first public demo was demoralizing, sent our stock plummeting, and attracted extensive media coverage,” read aloud an employee comment from Dory was then asked, “What really happened?” and asked “please share your candid thoughts on what happened at the launch of Bard.”

Pichai called the answer Krawczyk, who jumped around the topic without giving a direct answer.

“Questions like these can be fair and we want to reiterate the fact that Bard hasn’t debuted yet,” Krawczyk said. “We’re admitting to the world that this is something we’re testing — we’re testing it. But there’s a lot of excitement in the industry right now.”

Krawczyk also mentioned an event held in by Microsoft headquarters that weekin which the company demonstrated how OpenAI’s technology can power Bing search results and other products.

“You see stories about ChatGPT that coincide with an event that we’re really focusing on looking for,” Krawczyk said. “There may be challenges around external perception, but as you heard today, we continue to focus on Bard’s test.”

Krawczyk added that Google is happy to have the technology in “user hands to capture their creativity”.

Pichai added: “It was a stressful time.”

“The purpose of the blog post was that when we decided to go see trusted external testers, things could leak and it was important that we located it,” Pichai said. “We haven’t launched the product yet. And obviously when we do, we’ll make it clear that it’s an experimental product.”

Pichai said that the company hopes to provide more details after Google IO’s annual developer conference. Google has yet to announce a date for the event.

Another top-rated employee comment from Dory said, “Launching AI seems like an instant response without strategy.”

Pichai begins his answer by noting that Google spends more money on AI research and development than any other company.

“I disagree with the premise of this question,” he said, laughing. “We have been doing deep research on AI for a long time. You’re right that we have to focus on the user and make sure we’re building impactful things.” He said, “user opinion will be an important part of the campaign.” process so it’s important to get it right.”

Jeff Dean, Google’s chief AI officer, was summoned by Pichai at a joint meeting to answer a question regarding the company’s loss of top talent. In particular, the question is why Google has lost so many key personnel who are listed on an article about outstanding architecture used for AI.

“I think it’s important to realize this is a super competitive field,” says Dean. “People with these types of skills are in high demand.”

Dean said Google has “two of the best AI research teams in the world” and “who work side by side to advance AI technology”.

Despite the competition in the market, “we have the ability to put things on paper here but also work on products that reach millions of users every day,” Dean said.

Pichai added that, “Just over the last few weeks, we’ve been talking to a number of people wanting to join Google who are literally some of the best ML researchers and engineers on the planet.”

A Google spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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