When the competitor’s Google ChatGPT event was announced last week, we wrote that it looked like an emergency job to appease investors, and the event has since come and gone worse than anyone could have imagined. Google’s event did exactly the opposite of what it wanted: Shares fell nearly 12 percent from their recent high just before the event. Even Google employees are starting to take notice: CNBC’s Jennifer Elias writes that internally, employees are criticizing CEO Sundar Pichai for what they call a “hasty and bad”announcement of Google’s new chatbot.
CNBC reports that they were able to view several posts from Google’s internal employee forum “Memegen”, and while they are usually light-hearted, the report states that “messages following Bard’s announcement took a more serious tone and were even directed directly at Pichai.”
Google announced the discovery of a competitor to ChatGPT last Wednesday, but then made the odd decision to spoil that announcement with a blog post two days earlier. The reason appears to have been that Microsoft had already sent out invitations to launch the ChatGPT-powered “New Bing”product on Tuesday, ahead of Google’s announcement by a day, and Google wanted to get ahead of the early adopters.
The two events were intertwined, but they couldn’t have been more different. Microsoft announced the “New Bing”on Tuesday and launched the product. It has a lot of speed limits right now, but Bing + ChatGPT is in the wild where it will try to compress search results into a readable paragraph and answer questions. It is also integrated into the Microsoft Edge browser, where it can answer questions, help write something, or summarize a page. This is a real product that people can try.
Google’s Monday announcement of its “Bard”chatbot gave only an overview of Google’s planned features, with details so vague that anyone could write them (it’s a chatbot inside Google Chat that will answer questions!). The Google post contained one example of an answer, and that answer turned out to be incorrect, earning him an embarrassing corrective article in Reuters. The blog post has since been updated with a new example, but it highlighted the AI’s tendency to generate plausible-sounding but incorrect answers.
According to a CNBC report, a staff member wrote that “Bard’s panicked rush to the market confirmed the market’s fears about us.”Another posted an image of a fire in a trash can with the Google logo, saying it reflected “how things have felt since last year.”Another criticized the way the company seems to be stock-focused lately, stating, “Laying off 12,000 people increases stock by 3%, one rushed AI presentation lowers it by 8%.”
What really confuses Google is that it invented the key technology behind ChatGPT. “GPT”in ChatGPT stands for “Generative Pre-trained Transformer”and “Transformer”is a neural network architecture that was invented and discovered by the Google Brain team in 2017. At the time, Google described Transformer as “particularly good for understanding language,”but never built a product with the technology. ChatGPT owner OpenAI is turning AI research into products like ChatGPT and DALL-E that people can actually use while Google keeps them locked up in a lab. Two events, one with the launch of the product and the other without it, only reinforced this narrative last week.