At an all-hands assembly Thursday, Google employees had the possibility to pepper CEO Sundar Pichai and Bard product lead Jack Krawczyk with questions, in accordance with CNBC, which mentioned it obtained audio of the assembly.

One employee requested the next query by way of Google’s inside discussion board Dory, in accordance with CNBC:

“Bard and ChatGPT are massive language fashions, not data fashions. They’re nice at producing human-sounding textual content, they don’t seem to be good at making certain their textual content is fact-based. Why do we expect the large first utility needs to be Search, which at its coronary heart is about discovering true data?”

Krawczyk, making his all-hands debut, shortly responded, “I simply wish to be very clear: Bard just isn’t search.”

As an alternative, he mentioned, it’s “a collaborative A.I. service.”

“The magic that we’re discovering in utilizing the product is basically round being this inventive companion to serving to you be the spark plug for creativeness, discover your curiosity, and so forth.,” he mentioned. However, he added, “We are able to’t cease customers from making an attempt to make use of it like search.”

After all, search could be very a lot on the minds of Google traders and staff. When OpenAI shared its A.I. chatbot ChatGPT with the general public in late November, ideas instantly turned to how the know-how may disrupt Google’s search dominance. 

Fears about that have been hardly allayed when Microsoft launched a ChatGPT-powered rival to Google search final month. (It’s obtainable to a restricted variety of customers for now however can be extra broadly obtainable quickly.)

Google responded final month with a video of a demo of Bard, however that was botched by a factual error from the chatbot regarding the James Webb Area Telescope. Wall Avenue promptly punished Google mum or dad Alphabet, sending its shares down sharply.

One other query on Thursday was concerning the demo, in accordance with CNBC, with an worker asking, “The primary public demo was demoralizing, despatched our inventory right into a nosedive, and invited large media protection. What actually occurred?”

“Questions like this may be honest and we wish to reiterate the truth that Bard has not launched,” Krawczyk replied. “We acknowledged to the world that that is one thing that we’re experimenting with—we’re testing it. However there’s a whole lot of pleasure within the trade proper now.”

One other employee reportedly commented, “Launching AI looks as if a knee-jerk response and not using a technique.”

“I disagree with the premise of this query” Pichai responded, noting Google has been “engaged on A.I. for a very long time.” 

Certainly, OpenAI was established in 2015 “as a counterweight to Google” in A.I., Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who helped begin it, tweeted final month. He additionally complained that OpenAI had “turn out to be a closed supply, maximum-profit firm successfully managed by Microsoft.” (Musk is now reportedly working to set up a rival to OpenAI.)

However Google, although it’s lengthy been sturdy on the A.I. analysis entrance, has way more to lose than anybody else if customers begin Googling much less and turning to the A.I. chatbots of others extra for his or her search queries. 

Google didn’t instantly reply to Fortune’s request for feedback.

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