'Google was hesitant': Alphabet chairman opens up about ChatGPT-rival Bard

Alphabet Chairman John Hennessy has opened up about the company's ChatGPT rival Bard, which was announced last week. The announcement was meant to demonstrate that Google has similar technology to the popular ChatGPT chatbot, but according to Hennessy, the company is still hesitant to productize it because it doesn't think it's ready for the public yet.

Speaking at a summit held by venture firm Celesta Capital in California (via CNBC) Hennessy said that Bard is a great piece of technology as a demonstration vehicle, but generative artificial intelligence is still one to two years away from being a truly useful tool for the broader public.

Hennessy, who has a long history in tech, including as a professor, researcher, and company founder, and who served as the president of Stanford University from 2000 to 2016, spoke on key trends for 2023 and briefly touched on Google being caught in the sudden onrush of interest in ChatGPT and generative AI.

Last week, the company launched its response to ChatGPT in a conversation technology it is calling Bard. However, the announcement had the appearance of being rushed to match Microsoft's inclusion of ChatGPT technology into its search engine, Bing, and investors punished Alphabet stock, sending it down 9% for the day. Even internally, Google employees believed that the entire event was very "un-Googley" and "botched". 

Offering a justification, Hennessy claimed that Google is slow to roll out its ChatGPT competitor in part because it's still giving wrong answers. Google is among the most-used consumer products, and entities like YouTube and Search have sometimes provided inaccurate information in the past. That past is inspiring caution at the company.

Also read: Google Bard AI gets fact-checked: The story behind the $100 billion mistake

"You don't want to put a system out that either says wrong things or sometimes says toxic things," Hennessy said during the conference, echoing CEO Sundar Pichai's response in December when employees asked if the company was falling behind ChatGPT. The tech industry has to be "a little more careful about the situation we create in civil society," he acknowledged.

According to a report by CNBC, Hennessy said, "I think these models are still in the early days - figuring out how to bring them into a product stream and do it in a way that's sensitive to correctness, as well as issues like toxicity. I think the industry is struggling with that."

Hennessy added, "I don't think Vint anticipated that people would use the internet to do evil things," referring to Google executive Vint Cerf, who was one of the early developers of the internet's underlying technology.

"I'm from the age where, if you spam somebody, you were a social pariah. Now, I get 10 spam messages for every real message, so the world has changed, and we've got to think about what role technology has in ensuring that we have a functioning democracy, we have people who can live together and work together, we don't have hatred or some of these other toxic things. I think we really do need to work on that."

Hennessy added that he's been impressed with ChatGPT's abilities and that it is moving faster than he anticipated. "I'm impressed with two things - first of all, the quality of the natural language ability both to interpret a query but also to respond to something - the generative function. I'm impressed that it manages to, at least at a fairly superficial level, get a lot of things right."