Google execs say in all-hands meeting Bard A.I. isn’t all for search

Google Management continues to deal with the fallout from last month’s botched announcement of the company’s artificial intelligence engine, called Bard, but their efforts to clean up the mess are causing further turmoil among employees. increase.

At Thursday’s all-hands meeting, executives responded to questions from Dory, the company’s internal forum, according to audio obtained by CNBC. This is the first company-wide meeting since then. Google Employees criticized Google’s ChatGPT competitor Bard’s leadership over the announcement, particularly CEO Sundar Pichai.

Wall Street has punished Google parent company Alphabet for rolling out Bard, and as consumers turn to AI-powered responses that ultimately enable more conversational and creative answers, the company’s core search engine Concerns about the risk of replacement pushed the stock price down. The staff called Google’s first public presentation “hurried,” “failed,” and “unlike Google.”

Bard’s product lead, Jack Krawczyk, made his All Hands debut on Thursday, answering the following question from Dory as seen by CNBC:

“Bard and ChatGPT are large-scale language models, not knowledge models. Why do you think the first big application should be search, and is its heart to find real information?

Krawczyk promptly replied, “I want to be clear, Bard is not a search.”

“This is a joint AI service experiment that we talked about,” said Krawczyk. “The magic we have found in using this product is that you become the spark plug of your imagination, a creative companion to help you explore your curiosity.”

But Krawczyk quickly followed up by saying, “We can’t stop people from trying to use it like search.”

He said Google still caters to people who want to use it for searching, indicating that the company has built a new feature for internal use called “Search It.”

“We’re trying to generate queries that are associated with it and better convey confidence to users,” Krawczyk said. He added that users would see a tab called “View Other Drafts,” which could keep them away from search-like results.

“But we want to be part of a more search-oriented journey, so we already have a product for that – it’s called Search,” he said.

Attempts to separate Bard from Search appeared to mark an initial shift in strategy, based on what employees told CNBC and an internal meme that has been circulating in recent weeks. Prior to Bard’s announcement, Google executives repeatedly said the technology they were developing in-house could be integrated with search.

Several Google employees, who requested anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak on the matter, told CNBC that inconsistent responses from executives have caused more confusion.

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

“As Jack said, the bard is quite separate from the search,” Reed said.

But while the company is experimenting with LLM, “we want to keep the core of what search is,” Reid said.

Search was mentioned several times in Google’s announcement last month.

“We are working to incorporate these latest AI advancements into our products, including search,” the company said. blog post.

That same week, at a search event in Paris, Google’s head of search, Prabhakar Raghavan, presented some fresh examples of how Bard could be used. And following the announcement, company leaders asked all employees to put Bard to the test for hours, rewrite the wrong answers, and say, “Getting it right is a big responsibility.” urged.

CNBC also previously reported that the company is testing various Bard integrated home search page designs.

Another top-rated question was asked of Pichai on Thursday about Bird’s various use cases, as Google employees were asked to help with searches and “rewrite queries with factual information.” rice field.

“It’s important to acknowledge that it’s experimental,” Pichai replied. “It’s also very important to be aware of the limitations of these products.” These limitations he has addressed in the past.

Pichai said that Bard “exposes the ability for users to converse with LLMs”, which will improve over time. “And obviously we’re doing product engineering on top of that,” he said.

“A product like this gets better the more people use it. It’s a virtuous circle,” said Pichai.

After Google launched Bard in February, Alphabet’s stock fell nearly 9%. This suggests that investors were hoping for a further uptick given increased competition from Microsoft, which has made significant investments in OpenAI, which created ChatGPT.

Employees are well aware of how referrals are received.

“Initial public demonstrations were demoralizing, sent stock prices plummeting, and drew massive media coverage,” read a Dory employee’s comment. Then came the question, “What really happened?” and a request to “share your candid thoughts on what went wrong with the bard’s launch.”

Pichai referred to Crouchik’s answer, which danced around the subject without giving a direct answer.

“A question like this can be fair, and I would like to reiterate the fact that Bard has not launched,” said Krawczyk. However, there is a lot of excitement in the industry right now. “

Krawczyk also mentioned an event held in Microsoft’s At its headquarters that week, the company showed how OpenAI’s technology could power Bing’s search results and other products.

“You can see that the ChatGPT story aligns with our real-world search-focused events,” said Krawczyk. “There can be challenges with external perception, but as we heard today, we remain focused on testing Bird.”

Krawczyk added that Google is excited to have this technology “to capture the creativity of its users.”

Pichai exclaimed, “These are intense times.”

“The purpose of the blog post was that information could be leaked after we decided to go to an external trusted tester, and it was important to put it in place.” No, we will obviously make it clear that it is an experimental product when we launch it.”

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

Another top-rated employee comment from Dory said, “AI activation seems like a reflex reaction without a strategy.”

Pichai began his response by pointing out that Google spends more money on AI research and development than any other company.

“I disagree with the premise of this question,” he said with a laugh. You are right in the sense that we need to make sure that

Google’s head of AI, Jeff Dean, was called by Pichai at an all-hands meeting to answer questions about the company’s loss of top talent. Specifically, the question was why Google lost so many of the key figures he described in his paper on the prominent architectures used for AI.

“I think it’s important to understand that this is a very competitive field, and people with these kinds of skills are in great demand,” Dean said.

Dean said Google has “two of the best AI research teams in the world” and “people working together to advance the state of AI.”

Despite the competition in the market, “we have the ability to publish papers here, but we are also working on products that touch millions of users every day.

“Over the past few weeks, I’ve been talking to several people who want to join Google, who are literally the best ML researchers and engineers on the planet,” Pichai said.

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

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