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

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.