Google didn’t think its Bard AI was “really ready” for a product just yet

• Alphabet chairman John Hennessy said Google is reluctant to use its Bard AI in a product because it’s not “really ready” yet, according to CNBC.
• Google unveiled its Bard AI last week amid intense interest in competitor ChatGPT.
• But a promo for Google Bard had a factual error — which sent Alphabet’s stock down 9% in one day.

Google’s experimental AI chatbot, Bard, didn’t get the warm response it might have expected – an ad for the product contained an embarrassing factual error that hurt the company’s stock price and was branded “hasty” by company employees “botched” work was criticized.

Now the chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, says the tech giant may have even been reluctant to bring the technology to market.

“I think Google was hesitant to produce this because it wasn’t really ready for a product, but I think as a demonstration vehicle it’s a great piece of technology,” said John Hennessy, speaking at the TechSurge conference on Monday , reported CNBC.

He added that Google was slow to introduce Bard because there are still wrong answers. Google unveiled Bard amid intense interest in rival chatbot ChatGPT and just a day before Microsoft launched its AI-powered Bing search engine, built with technology from OpenAI, ChatGPT’s parent company.

Hennessy also warned Monday that AI chatbots are still in the early stages of development. And he’s not alone — Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak and OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman have expressed similar concerns.

“I think these models are still in their infancy — we need to figure out how to get them into a product stream and do it in a way that is mindful of correctness and issues like toxicity,” Hennessey told CNBC on Monday. “I think the industry is struggling with that.”

Prabhakar Raghavan, Google’s search engine chief, also told the newspaper “Welt am Sonntag” on Saturday that AI chatbots can generate false but convincing answers in a phenomenon known as “hallucination”.

Google learned the hard way how bad things can turn out. Alphabet’s share price plummeted 9% last Wednesday after reports emerged that the company gave an incorrect answer to a question about NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

At the conference, Hennessy declined to comment specifically on the public’s reaction to Google’s bard, according to CNBC.

Google didn’t immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment, which was sent outside of regular business hours.