Faced with the rapid rise of the artificial intelligence (AI) robot ChatGPT, Google this week launched its own robot Bard to challenge, but answered irrelevant questions, causing the stock market value to evaporate by more than 150 billion U.S. dollars this week. Google employees have taken to internal forums to express their dissatisfaction, criticizing CEO Sundar Pichai and the top management for launching Bard in a hurry, clumsy, and not at all Google-like.
According to internal messages and memos obtained by CNBC, after Bard’s conference was released, Google employees criticized senior management on the company’s internal forum Memegen for being “rushed,” “clumsy,” and “not at all Google.”
Google first revealed some information about AI chatbot technology on Monday, and then officially released Bard on Wednesday, and Microsoft showed the results of Bing search engine integrating ChatGPT technology developed by OpenAI on Tuesday. Microsoft was an early investor in OpenAI.
At Google’s Wednesday event, research director Prabhakar Raghavan briefly demonstrated the Bard’s capabilities with a few slides, when one of the presenters forgot to bring the phone used for the demonstration. The audience wanted to hear more, and some employees were unaware that the company was hosting an event.
At the same time, people on Twitter began to point out that Bard gave the wrong answer to the space telescope that took the first photo of the planet in the solar system in the promotional video of Bard.
Although Google employees often ridicule the company’s small mistakes on Memegen, after Bard’s publication, the tone of the employees’ posts was more serious, and they even directly named the CEO. “Dear Sander (Pichai’s name), Bard’s announcement and layoffs were rushed, botched and short-sighted. Please re-think the long term,” according to a post with a grim photo of him .” The article was endorsed by many employees.
Another post that received support from many people said: “Sander and executives, you can only get PerfNI (the lowest rating for Google employee performance). Your pursuit of “focus” is ridiculously short-sighted and not Google-style at all .”
This refers to Pichai’s call last year for employees to be more focused, and the “Googles” that leadership encourages to be, roughly referring to ambition, hard work, respect and teamwork.
Bard’s unfavorable start, coupled with ChatGPT’s threat to the core search business, caused Alphabet’s (GOOGL-US) stock price to plummet by about 8% this week, with a market value loss of more than 150 billion U.S. dollars. The stock closed Friday at $94.57 per share. A company spokesman did not respond to CNBC’s report.
The report pointed out that in December last year, an employee asked what Google’s advantage was when ChatGPT became popular. At that time, the supervisor responded that the AI chat technology was not perfect enough, and a hasty launch would hurt himself.
“The rush to put Bard on the market just confirmed the market’s concerns about us,” one post said.
A widely retweeted meme on Monday featured a photo of a trash can with the letter G on it on fire, with the caption, “How’s it been since last year.”
Another meme alludes to Google’s 12,000 layoffs or 6% of its manpower last month. In the picture, Hollywood actor Nicholas Cage said with a smile: “12,000 layoffs will make the stock price rise by 3%, and the stock price will rise by 3%. A hasty AI conference caused the stock price to drop by 8%.”
