Google has released ChatGPT’s chatbot competitor called Bard, but Google employees are not happy how the company handles the situation
This week, angry Google employees made fun of CEO Sundar Pichai on internal message boards because the tech giant messed up the launch of its “Bard” AI chatbot.
During Monday’s presentation, the much-hyped competitor to the popular Microsoft-backed ChatGPT chatbot, which is seen as a possible threat to Google’s search engine dominance, gave the wrong answer.
According to CNBC, which saw some of the posts on Google’s internal forum “Memegen,” workers called the troubled launch “rushed,” “botched,” and “not Google.”
“Dear Sundar, the launch of Bard and the layoffs were rushed, messed up, and short-sighted. “Please go back to thinking about the long term,” one user wrote in the caption of a meme of Pichai looking serious, the outlet said.
In another post, an employee said, “Rushing Bard to market in a panic confirmed the market’s fears about us.”
Alphabet, the company that owns Google, has seen its market value drop by about 7% since Monday. At one point, the company’s market value dropped by $100 billion in a single day, as investors were skeptical about the company’s launch.
One of the posts on Memegen was a meme of a dumpster fire with the Google logo on it and the words, “How everything has felt since last year.”
In another post, the decision by Alphabet to lay off more than 6% of its workers, or about 12,000 people, last month was mentioned. Pichai said that the layoffs were necessary because the economy was getting worse and would make it easier for Google to work on AI technology and other important goals.
“Firing 12,000 people raises the stock by 3%, but one rushed AI presentation drops it by 8%,” said the meme, which showed a smiling picture of actor Nicholas Cage.
The Post has asked Google what they think about the backlash from their own employees.
Analysts said earlier this week that when Google introduced Bard, it didn’t say much about how it planned to use the chatbot in its search engine. Microsoft has already made its “Bing” browser compatible with ChatGPT.
CNBC said that some Google employees didn’t know about what was going on in Paris before it happened.
During the event, Bard gave the wrong answer to a question that was asked in the company’s ad to show how the chatbot works.
In the gif video, a user asked Bard, “What new discoveries can I tell my 9-year-old about from the James Webb Space Telescope?”
The chatbot said that JWST was “used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside of the Earth’s solar system.” It wasn’t the right answer. The European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) took the first pictures of so-called “exoplanets” in 2004.
