The anticipation for Google’s Feb 8 event was high. Alphabet, Google’s parent company was to deliver its answer to ChatGPT, the precocious chatbot that has AI-addled world in a tizzy with its ability to answer college-level essay questions, program code, name your dog... and God knows what else.
But Google did not deliver. A beta version of its chatbot was still a month away and still not ready for public testing. We do have a name, though. Bard. After Shakespeare, I presume. But wait, don’t go, they said. Look at all the marvelous things we've done with AI.
A series of innovations Google had previously introduced was listed in case you had missed them. Google does tends to slip things in and to give you joy on discovering them, without fanfare. Like its calculator, which I discovered accidentally can do all sorts of math and plotting. It was never announced, never productized and still doesn’t have a name, it’s interface still only the search box. To enjoy it you have to know about it. It’s like the secret menu at In ‘n Out.
We gave you Google Assistant years ago, says the Google presenter. It’s practically a ChatGPT plus voice activation. And don’t you love the visual search, the presenter asks. We have made the camera the keyboard.
I did not know about it. They never told me.
And Google Maps has an immersive view, they say.
I try to find it and cannot. It must be available for Android phones. I have an iPhone.
“You want something new?,” they say, perhaps remote sensing my interest waning through my Google smart speaker. “We have an app for arts and culture.”
I’m not sure anyone asked for an app for arts and culture from Google. It sounds like a pet project by Google engineers wishing they knew a little bit more about paintings and opera and assuming everyone else did, too. .
A presenter reaches for her smart phone (no doubt a Google Pixel) but can’t find it. I died for her. But it was hardly the worst fail in live product introductions. Remember the blue screen of death when Bill Gates was introducing Windows 98? Or when they shattered the “bulletproof” glass of Tesla’s new Cybertruck by throwing steel balls at it? “But it didn’t go through,” says Elon Musk.
Why do tech companies insist on live events, I wondered and laughed. Elon Musk doesn’t need my pity.
By the time the Paris event was livestreaming, the damage had already been done. Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai had announced the company’s chatbot, Bard, with a sampling of questions that Bard could answer. It should have been a master stroke, the search giant able to field and correctly answer questions spanning human knowledge, the robot equivalent of Peter Jennings (Jeopardy! Champion) with the vast reach of Google, or the head reference librarian at the Library of Congress. Except one of the answers was wrong. So stated Reuters, the news agency that prides itself on getting it right, which had done the fact check that Google, in its haste to pull even with ChatGPT, had not. The James Webb Telescope didn't discover exoplanets. The European Southern Observatory's telescope did. It was a mistake that could easily have been avoided if Pichai had used Google instead of Bard.
Bad news travels fast these days. Investors were quick to punish Google for the blunder, sending Alphabet shares down 9% -- a loss of $100 billion in market value—before they evened out.
More important and more permanent may be how this reflects on Google. The uncontested search leader for 25 years, has Google gone from novelty to yesterday’s news? Has Google become the new Microsoft, a company whose products you use all the time, even depend on, but have lost the luster of the shiny new objects?
Google still has the best search, bar none. It has taken great care in sorting the Internet, referring us to safe sites. We can be sure Google will not send us to a site bent on swindling us, using copied articles or one that has spoofed its way to the top of the search results.
Google had resisted introducing its chatbot until that fateful Wednesday because it was not ready for public use. Google is now an established company with a reputation to preserve. Bard was unnamed and being tested. Wisely, it was held back to avoid the risk of an embarrassing failures of chatbots past. In 2016, Microsoft’s chatbot Tay made it sixteen hours before spewing a series of racist and racist and misogynistic tweets and Microsoft had to shut it down. Meta (formerly Facebook) yanked its chatbot Galactica after it “spat our biased and incorrect nonsense,” according to TechnologyReview.com.
Google is trying to be more “responsible,” as it stated 4 times during the livestream.
No doubt Googles leadership panicked upon hearing that ChatGPT landed a $10 billion investment from its arch enemy, Microsoft. It was easy to see how Microsoft could, with ChatGPT’s technology, make Bing, the most expensive search engine nobody uses, to one that leapfrogs Google.
Pichai, in a panic, issued a code red to his managers and called Sergei Brin and Larry Page, Google’s founders, back into the building for an emergency meeting and followed quickly (too quickly) with his fateful product announcement – overpromising the accuracy of a product still at least months away from prime time. It would have been wise to wait, issue a more reserved statement, as “we are working on it” sort of thing, and continue with having Bard learn and testing it, making sure it can provide the right answer, say 99% of the time. No company besides Alphabet has the resources to do that or such a head start in search and AI.
A little patience would not kill them.