Google CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly told employees on Monday local time that the company needs all of its employees together to test Bard, Google's new product to combat the recent fire of ChatGPT.
Pichai also said that Google will soon begin seeking partners to help it test an application architecture (API) that will allow other people or businesses to access the same underlying technology.
The internal memo was released shortly after Pichai publicly announced Google's new conversation technology, which is powered by artificial intelligence and will begin rolling out in the coming weeks. Google is under pressure from investors and employees to compete with Microsoft-backed OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT, which drew intense public attention when it was launched late last year.
"Starting next week, we're asking every Googler to help shape the Bard and contribute through a special company-wide Dogfood test," Pichai wrote in an email to employees.
Dogfood is a term used internally by Google to refer to a practice that involves using one's own product before launching one. He added: "We look forward to getting all of your feedback, and in the spirit of an internal hackathon, more details are to come."
Pichai also said in a note to employees that Prabhakar Raghavan, the head of search operations, would "share progress" at an event in Paris later this week.
In a blog post to the public shortly after the internal note was published, Pichai said Bard's responses to questions would need to be rigorously tested so that they met "high standards of quality, safety and real-world information fundamentals."
Last week, it was reported that the company, which is controlled by Alphabet, was recruiting employees to prioritize several AI projects as part of a "code red" effort to combat AI competition, including a chatbot code-named "Apprentice Bard" and new search features. Both projects were confirmed by the company's blog post on Monday.
Microsoft is reportedly planning a new version of its own search engine, Bing, that will use ChatGPT to answer users' search queries. Microsoft will hold its own event on Tuesday, featuring OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman.
"Right now the technology is young, we need to go live and iterate, and we have a lot of hard and exciting work ahead of us to incorporate these technologies into our products and continue to use the benefits of Google AI to improve people's lives," Pichai wrote in a note to employees on Monday. We've been approaching this work with an intensity and focus that reminds me of the early days of Google, so I want to thank everyone who has contributed."
Pichai also talked about letting outsiders build their own applications and products using the same underlying technology, the language model for conversational applications, or LaMDA, through apis.
"Next month, we will start taking on individual developers, creators, and enterprises, experimenting with the generation language API (Application Programming Interface) originally offered by LaMDA, and will have a range of modes to choose from," Pichai said in the email. Over time, our goal is to create a set of tools and apis that will make it easy for others to build more innovative applications with AI."
A Google spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Responsible Editor: Zheng Zhuo
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