Days after its stock dropped as a result of the chatbot's highly visible error, Alphabet's chairman claims that Google didn't believe Bard AI was "truly ready" for a product yet
A promotional ad for Google's experimental AI chatbot Bard contained an embarrassing factual error, which adversely affected the company's stock price. As a result, Bard did not receive the positive reception Google might have anticipated. The company's staff criticized the Paris reveal event for being a "rushed" and "botched" effort.
Google's parent company, Alphabet, may have even been hesitant to introduce the technology, according to its chairman.
According to John Hennessy, who spoke on Monday at the TechSurge conference, "I think Google was hesitant to productize this because it didn't think it was really ready for a product yet, but I think, as a demonstration vehicle, it's a terrific piece of technology."
Google was sluggish to introduce Bard, he continued, because it was still providing incorrect information. Google introduced Bard just a day before Microsoft launched their AI-powered Bing search engine, which was constructed using technology from OpenAI, the company that owns ChatGPT, and in the midst of considerable interest in rival chatbot ChatGPT.
On Monday, Hennessy added a word of caution, saying that AI chatbot development is still in its infancy.
"I believe these models are still in their infancy as we try to figure out how to integrate them into a product stream while being mindful of issues like toxicity," Hennessey said to CNBC on Monday. "I believe that is a problem for the industry."
Google's search engine chief, Prabhakar Raghavan, also claimed in an interview with the newspaper Welt am Sonntag on Saturday that AI chatbots are capable of "hallucination," a condition in which they give responses that are wrong yet plausible.
Google's search engine chief, Prabhakar Raghavan, also claimed in an interview with the newspaper Welt am Sonntag on Saturday that AI chatbots are capable of "hallucination," a condition in which they give responses that are wrong yet plausible.
Google discovered the hard way how disastrous this may be. After news broke that Alphabet had misled the public regarding NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, Alphabet's stock price fell 9% on Wednesday.
According to CNBC, Hennessy declined to address the public's response to Google's Bard during the conference.
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| Alphabet chairman |
Outside of regular business hours, Insider contacted Google for comment, but they did not answer right away.