Sundar Pichai asks Google employees to spend 4 hours with Bard

After a rushed launch of Bard, Sundar Pichai, Google CEO, is trying to restore faith in rival ChatGPT, at least among his colleagues. In an email seen by CNBC, Pichai says workers should try out the AI-powered chatbot as ChatGPT's popularity and potential business continue to grow rapidly. The email was sent a week after Google unveiled its own Bard artificial intelligence chatbot, its initial demo offering incorrect answers. After the demo, Google shares fell substantially, leaving Google shareholders and investors in a frenzy.

Pichai has also asked employees to give two to four hours of their time to Bard to improve its technology. The company will reportedly send out a detailed plan next week. He reminded the staff that Google hasn't always been the first to launch a product, but that hasn't impeded its ability to win.

In the company-wide email, Pichai said this is an "uncomfortably exciting" moment, referring to Bard's launch mishap. The letter shares, "I know this moment is uncomfortably exciting, and that's to be expected: the underlying technology is evolving rapidly with so much potential... Some of our most successful products were not first to market. They gained momentum because they solved important user needs and were built on deep technical insights."

Google was referring to its leading position in the search market. In the early 2000s, there were several search engines on the market, but now Google has 90 per cent of the market. It is also not the pioneer of Android, although it bought it at an early stage. During that time, the market was dominated by Blackberry and Nokia custom OS, but today, Android has the largest mobile OS market share.

In the email, Pichai was optimistic and said that AI has "gone through many winters and springs", adding that the "most important thing we can do right now is to focus on building a great product and developing it responsibly."

Following the irregular launch of Google Bard last week, Google employees said the launch was rushed and failed. Google was feeling a lot of pressure from Microsoft, which is leveraging OpenAI's next-generation ChatGPT technology in its Bing search engine and Edge browser.