Google's Sunder Pichai suggests employees that 80,000 helped test Bard A.I., which cautioned that 'things will go wrong'

March 21, 2023: Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told workers that the success of its launched Bard A.I. program hinges on public testing.

“As more people use Bard and test its capabilities, they’ll surprise us. Things will go wrong,” Pichai stated in an internal email to employees Tuesday viewed.

 “But the user feedback is critical to developing the product and the underlying technology.”

The message to workers comes as Google launched Bard as “an experiment” Tuesday morning, following months of anticipation. The product, built on Google’s LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, can offer chatty answers to complicating or open-ended questions, such as “give me ideas on the way to introduce my daughter to fly fishing.”

Alphabet shares were up nearly 4% in mid-day trading after the announcement.

In many disclaimers in the product, the firm warns that Bard is making mistakes or “giving inappropriate answers.”

The recent internal messaging comes as the firm tries to keep pace with the quickly evolving advancements in generative AI technology over the previous several months, especially Microsoft-backed OpenAI and ChatGPT technology.

Employees and investors are criticizing Google after Bard’s initial announcement in January, appearing rushed to compete with Microsoft’s just-announced Bing integration of ChatGPT. In the latest all-hands meeting, employees’ top-rated questions needed clarification around the purpose of Bard. At that discussion, executives defended Bard as an experiment and attempted to make distinctions between the chatbot and its core search product.

Pichai’s Tuesday email also said 80,000 Google workers contributed to testing Bard, answering Pichai’s all-hands-on-deck call to action the previous month, which included a plea for employees to re-write the chatbot’s wrong answers.

Pichai’s Tuesday note also said the firm is trying to test responsibly and invited 10,000 appointed testers “from various backgrounds and perspectives.”

Pichai said employees “should be happy about this work and the years of tech breakthroughs leading us here, which include our 2017 Transformer research and foundational models like PalM and BERT.” He added: “Even after all this growth, we’re still in the stages of a long Al journey.”

“For now, I’m excited to witness how Bard sparks creativity and curiosity in the people using it,” he said. He adds he looks ahead to sharing “the breadth of our away in AI” at Google’s annual developer conference.