Sundar Pichai, chief executive officer of Google Inc., speaks during the Google I/O Developers Conference in Mountain View, California, U.S., on Tuesday, May 8, 2018.
David Paul Morris | Bloomberg | Getty Images
Google executives are continuing to deal with the fallout from last month’s fumbled announcement of the company’s artificial intelligence engine called Bard, but their efforts to clean up the mess are causing further confusion among the workforce.
In an all-hands meeting on Thursday, executives answered questions from Dory, the company’s internal forum, with most of the top-rated issues related to the priorities around Bard, according to audio obtained by CNBC. It’s the first companywide meeting since Google employees criticized leadership, most notably CEO Sundar Pichai, for the way it handled the announcement of Bard, Google’s ChatGPT competitor.
Wall Street has punished Google parent Alphabet for the Bard rollout, pushing the stock lower on concern that the company’s core search engine is at risk of getting displaced as consumers eventually turn to AI-powered responses that allow for more conversational and creative answers. Staffers called Google’s initial public presentation “rushed,” “botched” and “un-Googley.”
Jack Krawczyk, the product lead for Bard, made his all-hands debut on Thursday, and answered the following question from Dory, which was viewed by CNBC.
“Bard and ChatGPT are large language models, not knowledge models. They are great at generating human-sounding text, they are not good at ensuring their text is fact-based. Why do we think the big first application should be Search, which at its heart is about finding true information?”
Krawczyk responded by immediately saying, “I just want to be very clear: Bard is not search.”
“It’s an experiment that’s a collaborative AI service that we talked about,” Krawczyk said. “The magic that we’re finding in using the product is really around being this creative companion to helping you be the…
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