Google CEO tells staff to spend more time with AI Chatbot Bard

Google CEO, Sundar Pichai has reportedly asked employees to spend two to four hours on improving Bard, the company's AI chatbot that Google intends to integrate into search. 

In a leaked company-wide email sent to employees, as seen by Business Insider, Pichai said that the workers must test the AI-powered chatbot.  

The email comes a week after Google unveiled its own AI chatbot ‘Bard’, which offered an incorrect response to a question about the James Webb Space Telescope, during its first demo. The blunder reportedly caused the company to lose $100 million in stock price, leaving the company’s stakeholders and investors anxious on the future of the technology. 

Following Bard's controversial launch last week, Google employees also called the rollout rushed and botched.  

Google is feeling massive pressure from Microsoft which has caught attention for its announcement of $10 billion investment in OpenAI. Notably, OpenAI created ‘ChatGPT’, which has gained immense popularity since its launch in November 2022. It is capable of generating speeches, songs, marketing copy, news articles and student essays or human-like text based on the input it is given. 

Last week, Microsoft released a revamped version of its Bing search engine powered by ChatGPT, with Microsoft’s chief executive Satya Nadella calling it a "new day" for search. 

Addressing employees in a memo, Pichai wrote, "I know this moment is uncomfortably exciting, and that's to be expected: the underlying technology is evolving rapidly with so much potential". 

He added, "The most important thing we can do right now is to focus on building a great product and developing it responsibly”. 

AI has gone through many winters and springs," Pichai concluded. "And now it's blooming again. As an AI-first company, we've been working towards this for many years and are ready for it," Pichai wrote. 

Notably, Google recently invested nearly $400 million in OpenAI rival Anthropic, a company that is now hiring a “prompt engineer” for somebody to develop ways to get large language models to perform specific tasks, according to a report in Bloomberg, published earlier this month.  

The company has also announced 12,000 job cuts or 6% of its global workforce. Google alone (without its parent company Alphabet) however still employs over 170,000 around the world.