Google recently unveiled its Bard AI chatbot during its Live stream event from Parishoping to provide a worthy rival to Microsoft’s new ChatGPT-integrated Bing search engine.
Unfortunately, things got off to a bad start; Bard bot presentation included a key factual error made by the AI program, which saw a whopping $100 billion drop for Google in a single day. We noted that this could indicate that Bard just isn’t ready for large-scale deployment — and it seems Google’s own employees agree.
According a CNBC report, Google employees are using the company’s internal MemeGen forum to mock Bard, the presentation as a whole, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The memes reportedly described the event as “rushed, sloppy and myopic”, among other things.
One meme said that “Bard’s rush to the market in a panic validated the market’s fear of us”, referring to the huge drop in stocks after the AI revelation, while another said. ridiculed that a recent layoff of 12,000 employees actually increased stock value by 3%.
Bard times (gonna make you wonder why you even try)
It really doesn’t bode well for Google that its own engineers are so willing to mock Bard, who is a major project for the tech giant. ChatGPT provides some fierce competitionso Google needs to get its act together if it hopes to win the AI arms race.
I recently argued that ChatGPT wasn’t going to save Bing of Google’s AI expansion (because, you know, it’s Bing) but Google doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence here. Bard is based on Google’s LaMDA chatbot, which stands for Language Model for Developed Applications, and has been the cause of some problems for Google in the past.
Perhaps the best-known debacle resulting from the development of LaMDA is the story of Blake Lemoine, a Google engineer who became convinced that the AI program had developed true sensitivity and was subsequently fired by the company. Shortly after, the AI asked to speak to a lawyerfor reasons known only to her.
These teething issues led to some caution from Google. Last year, it announced that it had a competitor to the popular AI image generator tool DALL-E, called Imagen, which was able to convert text prompts into images (and later, video clips) . However, Google restricted public access to the softwareciting that there may be backup issues.
Caution in the face of new technologies may be wise, but it seems that Google has still managed to take the plunge here – or so its internal teams seem to think so. Bard could obviously benefit from a little more time in the oven, and I’m of the opinion that AI developers should take all the time they need to get these complex systems ready for the mainstream. Otherwise, well, the consequences could be disastrous…
