Google staff criticizes CEO for ChatGPT "dumpster fire" response

The Google's ChatGPT competitor event seemed like a rush job aimed to reassure investors when it was scheduled for last week. Since then, that event took place and went worse than anyone could have predicted. The stock has dropped over 12 percent since its previous high just before the event, which is the exact opposite of what Google wanted from its event. Even Google employees are starting to pay attention, according to CNBC's Jennifer Elias, who reports that internal criticism of CEO Sundar Pichai for what they call a "rushed, bungled" debut of Google's new chatbot is coming from within the company. Photo Credit: Mezha.Media While these are typically lighthearted messages from Google's internal "Memegen" employee forum, CNBC claims it was able to view a number of them. The report claims that while these messages are typically lighthearted, "the posts after the Bard announcement struck a more serious tone and even went directly after Pichai." One message began, "Dear Sundar, the Bard launch and the layoffs were rushed, bungled, and narrow-minded. Please resume having a long-term perspective. Sundar, and leadership, deserve a Perf NI, read another post that received a lot of votes. The way they are going about'sharpening focus' is hilariously naive and un-Google. If someone were to grade Pichai's performance as CEO, it would be a "Perf NI," which stands for the lowest employee performance rating of "Needs Improvement." Last Wednesday, Google announced the launch of a ChatGPT rival, but bizarrely decided to leak the news two days earlier in a blog post. According to reports, this was because Microsoft had already distributed invitations for the ChatGPT-powered "New Bing" product launch scheduled for that Tuesday, predating Google's announcement by one day. Instead of a public product launch, Google chose to introduce its chatbot technology through a closed "trusted testers" program. Naturally, the firm wasn't prepared to debut anything because it appeared to have rushed to put this entire event together, but the simultaneous activities just served to underline just how far behind Google was. Only five minutes of Google's 40-minute presentation were devoted to ChatGPT, unlike Microsoft's, and almost all of that information was already available in the spoiler blog post from Monday. Google's event was primarily filler. The remainder of the presentation addressed minor upgrades to Google Translate, Maps, and Lens; however, this segment had to be missed after the speaker informed the audience that Google had "lost the phone" and had to perform something urgent. Photo Credit: Robinhood Snacks One employee reportedly stated in the CNBC report that "Rushing Bard to market in a frenzy justified the market's worry about us." Another user sent a photo of a trash burning with the Google logo on it, claiming it was an accurate representation of how things had been feeling since the previous year. One critic said, "Firing 12k personnel boosts the stock by 3%, one hasty AI presentation reduces it by 8%," in reference to how stock-focused the corporation has recently seemed to be. The fact that Google created the essential technology that powers ChatGPT is very disgusting. The "GPT" in "ChatGPT" stands for "Generative Pre-trained Transformer," where "Transformer" refers to a neural network architecture that the Google Brain team created and made available as open source in 2017. Although at the time Google said that Transformer was "especially well suited for language interpretation," the company never used the technology to develop a product. While Google keeps AI research locked away in a lab, ChatGPT's owner, OpenAI, transforms it into products like ChatGPT and DALL-E that consumers can really use. Last week's two events, one of which featured a product introduction and the other did not change that narrative.