Google CEO tells employees to test the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) system as he faces criticism for being slow to incorporate AI technologies into Google search.
Key Details
- Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent a company-wide email to employees asking them to spend a few hours testing Google’s AI chat tool Bard during the week.
- In the email, he tells employees that Google hasn’t always been the first to release products, but that hasn’t stopped the company from winning big with its version of popular releases.
- “Some of our most successful products were not first to market,” he says in the email. “They gained momentum because they solved important user needs and were built on deep technical insights.”
Why it’s news
Pichai has been criticized for being slow to add AI to Google to compete with competitor Microsoft who immediately jumped on the ChatGPT popularity by adding it to the company’s search engine Bing.
As the popularity of AI chatbot ChatGPT continues to skyrocket, Google has been receiving criticism for not adding AI services to its search engine.
Google’s competitor Microsoft immediately took action as ChatGPT started to gain popularity and added it to its search engine Bing, and many people were unhappy that Google hesitated to take those steps.
Google has introduced its own version of an AI chatbot with many similar features to ChatGPT called Bard. The company is testing the product heavily before releasing it to the masses in the upcoming weeks.
After ChatGPT was released in December, Google executives told the company that they would have to take more precautionary steps before releasing anything as the company has a reputation to uphold and doesn’t need to rush the release.
Many people have criticized Google for taking too long to release the product after Microsoft seemed to release ChatGPT on its service almost instantly, but Google wants to make sure everything is in working order before releasing.
Pichai wrote an email to all employees asking them to test the Bard product multiple times throughout the week, making sure it is working.
“The most important thing we can do right now is to focus on building a great product and developing it responsibly,” he writes in the email.
