Google CEO tells employees that 80,000 of them helped test Bard A.I., warns ‘things will go wrong’

 KEY POINTS

• Google CEO Sundar Pichai told employees in a memo on Tuesday that user feedback will be critical to its chatbot success.
• 80,000 employees participated in testing Bard, Pichai wrote.
• Pichai also noted that “things will go wrong,” but wrote, “user feedback is critical to improving the product and the underlying technology.”
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  Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai gestures during a session at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, on January 22, 2020.
  Fabrice COFFRINI | AFP | Getty Images

• Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told employees that the success of its newly launched Bard A.I. program now hinges on public testing.

  “As more people start to use Bard and test its capabilities, they’ll surprise us. Things will go wrong,” Pichai wrote in an internal email to employees Tuesday viewed by CNBC. “But the user feedback is critical to improving the product and the underlying technology.”

• The message to employees comes as Google launched Bard as “an experiment” Tuesday morning, after months of anticipation. The product, which is built on Google’s LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, can offer chatty responses to complicated or open-ended questions, such as “give me ideas on how to introduce my daughter to fly fishing.”

  Alphabet shares were up almost 4% in mid-day trading following the announcement.

  In many disclaimers in the product, the company warns that Bard may make mistakes or “give inaccurate or inappropriate responses.” 

  The latest internal messaging comes as the company tries to keep apace with the quickly evolving advancements in generative AI technology over the last several months — especially Microsoft-backed OpenAI and its ChatGPT technology

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  Employees and investors criticized Google after Bard’s initial announcement in January, which appeared rushed to compete with Microsoft’s just-announced Bing integration of ChatGPT. In a recent all-hands meeting, employees’ top-rated questions included confusion around the purpose of Bard. At that meeting, executives defended Bard as an experiment and tried to make distinctions between the chatbot and its core search product.