Google causes confusion within workforce about leadership’s exact plans for Bard

As Microsoft continues to improve the new Bing publicly, Google is still secretive about the development of Bard, which is being tested internally. Revealed last month, the company introduced it as a way to inject AI-powered features into Search. After this, the company explained to its workforce that “Bard is not search” and shared vague answers about the project priorities and use cases. According to a report, this caused confusion to those involved in the work.

The details were shared by CNBC, which got hold of an audio recording of the meeting. Workers involved in the project were reportedly confused due to the “inconsistent answers from executives” as the company tried to pivot away from its initial strategy for Bard, which was described as something different from search.

Jack Krawczyk, Bard’s product lead, answered this in a query raised in the company’s internal forum.

“Bard and ChatGPT are large language models, not knowledge models,” the written question read. “They are great at generating human-sounding text, they are not good at ensuring their text is fact-based. Why do we think the big first application should be Search, which at its heart is about finding true information?”

“I just want to be very clear: Bard is not search,” said Krawczyk. “It’s an experiment that’s a collaborative AI service that we talked about. The magic that we’re finding in using the product is really around being this creative companion to helping you be the sparkplug for imagination, explore your curiosity, etc.”

Despite this, Krawczyk said the company “can’t stop users from trying to use it like search” and still caters to such people using it for that purpose. While discussing this matter, Krawczyk shared that the company created an internal feature called “Search It” and a “view other drafts” tab to lead users away from search-like results.

“We’re going to be trying to get better at generating the queries associated there, as well as relaying to users our confidence,” Krawczyk said. “But as you want to get into more of the search-oriented journeys, we already have a product for that — it’s called search.”

Meanwhile, when asked about the use cases of Bard, CEO Sundar Pichai responded without exactly addressing the matter.

“It’s important to acknowledge that it’s experimental,” Pichai said. “It’s super important to acknowledge the limitations of these products as well.”

This confusion and lack of details about Bard, nonetheless, is expected to be cleared at Google IO, which still has no specific date.