Google recently released Bard, its ChatGPT competitor, for public testing. The AI chatbot can respond to user queries in a simplified manner and builds its responses using data from the internet. Google’s Bard is new to the AI space and is still in its early stages of testing, so it is bound to make mistakes now and then. In an email to employees, Google CEO Sundar Pichai warned his employees about Bard’s potential mistakes, according to CNBC.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, predicts that things will go wrong.
“They’ll surprise us as more people start to use Bard and test its capabilities.” According to CNBC, Pichai wrote in an email to Google employees, “Things will go wrong.” “However, user feedback is critical to improving the product and the underlying technology,” the email continues.
Bard was made available to a select group of users in the United Kingdom and the United States. People who want to use the town’s new AI chatbot must sign up for the waitlist and wait for access. Google Bard is not yet available in India, but Google plans to make it available in other countries as well.
Google wrote on its blog at the time of Bard’s public release, “You can use Bard to increase your productivity, accelerate your ideas, and pique your interest. You could ask Bard for advice on how to achieve your goal of reading more books this year, how to explain quantum physics in layman’s terms, or how to spark your creativity by outlining a blog post. By testing Bard, we’ve learned a lot, and the next critical step in improving it is to get feedback from more people.”
Sundar Pichai thanked 80,000 Google employees who helped test Bard internally in the same email in which he warned his employees about “things going wrong.”
The email begins, “I’m grateful to the Bard team, who have probably spent more time with Bard than anything or anyone else in recent weeks. We’re also grateful to the 80,000 Googlers who helped test it in the company’s dogfood. We should be proud of this work and the years of technological advances that brought us here, including our 2017 Transformer research and foundational models like PalM and BERT.”
By introducing Bard, Google attempted to compete with ChatGPT. However, within days of its release, Bard was being chastised for inappropriate responses, factual errors, and other flaws. When Reuters pointed out that Bard had given a factually incorrect response in its advertisement, a controversy erupted.
Google had asked its employees to fix the chatbot’s error and help test Bard in order to improve the chatbot’s responses. According to CNBC, Google’s vice president of search, Prabhakar Raghavan, asked employees to help work on Bard and rewrite its responses. According to the report, the email also included a link to a do’s and don’ts page with instructions for employees working with Bard.
