Sundar Pichai’s request to Google employees: Spend time on improving Bard AI

Sundar Pichai has asked Google employees to take time out for testing Bard

In an internal memo on February 15, Google CEO Sundar Pichai asked employees to spend 2 to 4 hours this week on improving Bard, its recently-released AI chatbot. The leaked company-wide email was reviewed by Business Insider.

“I know this moment is uncomfortably exciting, and that's to be expected: the underlying technology is evolving rapidly with so much potential,” Sundar Pichai wrote in his email to Googlers. “The most important thing we can do right now is to focus on building a great product and developing it responsibly.”

Pichai’s request is in line with what he had earlier asked Googlers after the release of Bard on February 6. “Next week, we’ll be enlisting every Googler to help shape Bard and contribute through a special company-wide dogfood,” the Google CEO had told employees in an email shortly after the announcement of Bard’s launch.

His email also signals the tech giant’s pivot to AI and its damage control after losing $100 billion in market value last week after the AI chatbot Bard gave a wrong answer. The bot was asked about what to tell a nine-year-old about discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope. It incorrectly offered the response that the telescope was the first to take pictures of a planet outside Earth's solar system, when that honor actually belongs to the European Very Large Telescope.

Google has found itself at a disadvantage when it comes to the AI space, thanks to Microsoft-funded ChatGPT that took the world by storm. The search engine giant is rushing into the space after ChatGPT caught the imagination of web users around the world with its ability to generate essays, speeches and even exam papers in seconds.

Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s Vice-President for search, also asked employees in an email to help the company make sure its new ChatGPT rival gets its answers right. The email, which CNBC viewed, included a link to a do’s and don’ts page with instructions on how employees should fix responses as they test the AI-enabled search tool internally. Staff was encouraged to rewrite answers on topics they understand well.

“Bard learns best by example, so taking the time to rewrite a response thoughtfully will go a long way in helping us to improve the mode,” the document said.