In what appears to be increasingly desperate times at Google, employees are now being asked to teach Google’s ChatGPT competitor BARD how to respond to topics they are “experts in”. The request came the same day that CEO Sundar Pichai asked staff to find up to four hours of their workday to devote to improving BARD.
In an email circulated to staff on Wednesday and leaked to CNBC, one of Google’s senior Vice President’s, Prabhakar Raghavan, asked staff to fact check BARD’s answers. “Your participation in the dogfood will help accelerate the model’s training and test its load capacity” the email said.
Last week Google employees criticized CEO Sundar Pichai for the botched unveiling of the AI which saw the search giant’s market cap fall over $200 billion in just three days. On internal messaging boards employees derided the event as “rushed”, “botched” and “comically short sighted”.
Further criticisms were levelled at the company this week by a former employee who warned that Google’s management is blunting the company’s competitive edge due cultural problems such as a lack of mission, a lack of urgency, delusions of exceptionalism and poor management.
Praveen Seshadri who joined Google when it a startup he cofounded, said Google’s current state was “fragile” and that innovation was being stifled by internal red tape which left staff “trapped” in a long line of approvals, performance reviews and meetings with “little room for creativity and innovation”.
Criticism of Google’s innovation and agility compared to its competitors is growing from commentors outside the company too, with detractors pointing out that its most successful products including its mobile stack, its ad stack, its video service, its document-collaboration tools, its cloud service, its server-management tools were all acquisitions, not inventions by Google itself.
On Monday The Information reported that Google was making progress on its attempts to innovate with data center chips that matched the power of rival Amazon’s Web Services business, but wouldn’t likely be used until 2025 at the earliest.
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