Google announced its AI-powered chatbot Bard a few days back and made a lot of headlines. And in its very first demo, Bard made a factual error, which was noticed and called out. In addition to this, at Google’s press conference held at Paris, a presenter couldn’t go ahead with the demo due to the phone being misplaced.
Following the two incidents, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, lost USD 100 million in market value.
Google employees have taken to their internal forum Memegen to slam the company and its CEO Sundar Pichai for the company’s widely criticized handling of the launch of Bard, its ChatGPT competitor, CNBC has reported.
According to CNBC, who viewed the internal messages, staffers described the Bard announcement as “rushed,” “botched and “un-Googley.”
While Googlers often turn to Memegen to humorously poke fun at the company’s quirks and missteps, the posts following the Bard announcement took a more serious tone and even directly criticized Pichai.
The accusations come after Google rushed forward its announcement of its ChatGPT competitor, Bard, in the same week that Microsoft showed how its Bing search engine will integrate ChatGPT technology.
One meme that included a picture of Pichai read: “Dear Sundar, the Bard launch and the layoffs were rushed, botched, and myopic. Please return to taking a long-term outlook.”
Another, which referenced the lowest category in Google’s employee performance system, read: “Sundar, and leadership, deserve a Perf NI. They are being comically short-sighted and un-Googlely in their pursuit of ‘sharpening focus.’”
As CNBC notes, “Googley” refers to being ambitious and hardworking, which are pushed onto staff as workplace traits the company encourages.
A highly-read meme this week showed an image of a dumpster fire with the Google “G” logo on it. The text said, “How everything’s felt since last year.”
Another meme referred to the layoffs announced last month, which resulted in the loss of 12,000 jobs, or 6% of the company’s workforce. The meme included a photo of a smiling actor Nicolas Cage and the caption: “Firing 12k people rises the stock by 3%, one rushed AI presentation drops it by 8%.”
It has been reported for quite some time that Google had been losing sleep over ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot that aims to completely change the way people browse the internet. In an attempt to compete with ChatGPT, Google introduced Bard.
Meanwhile, Microsoft also introduced a new version of its search engine, Bing, that uses the same technology as ChatGPT and will be focused on providing a better search experience.