Google employees took to Memegen this week, filling the message archive with criticisms of the company’s leadership regarding the Bard announcement.
The effort was called “rushed, botched,” and “comically short-sighted” by memes.
This week, Google’s attempt to compete with Microsoft’s ChatGPT integration caused Alphabet shares to fall by more than 9%.
However, employees of the search engine have criticized the company’s leadership, particularly CEO Sundar Pichai, for how it handled the announcement this week of Bard, a competitor to ChatGPT.
According to messages and memes, staff members expressed their opinions regarding the Bard announcement on the well-known internal forum Memegen, describing it as “rushed,” “botched,” and “un-Googley.”
Google’s CEO Pichai, gave a few details about Google’s chatbot technology to the public on Monday, a day before a Microsoft event. At an event in Paris on Wednesday, more information about Bard was made public.
Between those events, Microsoft, an early investor in OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, invited reporters to a demonstration at the company’s headquarters in Redmond, Washington, where it demonstrated how its Bing search engine will work with the buzzy chat technology.
Prabhakar Raghavan, head of search, gave a brief presentation on some slides on Wednesday at Google’s event that showcased some of Bard’s capabilities. Some employees were unaware of the event, and those tuning in were expecting more. A phone that was necessary for the demonstration was not brought by one presenter.
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In the meantime, Twitter users started pointing out that a Bard advertisement gave a misleading description of a telescope that was used to take the first pictures of a planet outside our solar system.
Memegen is often used by Google employees to make fun of the company’s quirks and mistakes, but posts after the Bard announcement were more serious and even attacked Pichai.
One meme with a serious picture of Pichai read, “Dear Sundar, the Bard launch and the layoffs were rushed, botched, and myopic.” Please resume looking ahead to the future. Employees gave the post a lot of upvotes.
A request for comment was not immediately answered by a Google representative.
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Another highly rated meme said, “Sundar and leadership deserve a Perf NI,” referring to the lowest category in the company’s system for employee performance reviews. In their pursuit of “sharpening focus,” they are unGooglely and comically short-sighted.
Pichai urged employees to focus more this year. Staff members are frequently encouraged by leadership to be “Googley,” which loosely translates to being ambitious, hardworking, and mindful of respect and teamwork.
Concerns about ChatGPT’s threat to Google’s core search business and the company’s hasty response to Microsoft’s event have caused Alphabet shares to fall by more than 9% this week.
Concerns about Google’s position in artificial intelligence are common. Employees inquired about the company’s AI competitive advantage during a December all-hands meeting as ChatGPT gained popularity. Executives responded by stating that the company’s not-perfect AI-chat technology could damage its reputation if it moved too quickly.
This week, a meme that got a lot of attention featured an image of a dumpster fire with the Google “G” logo on it. “How everything’s felt since last year,” the text stated.
Another meme made reference to the layoffs that were announced last month, which cost the company 12,000 jobs, or 6% of its workforce. The caption of the meme, which read, “Firing 12k people rises the stock by 3%, one rushed AI presentation drops it by 8%,” was a picture of actor Nicolas Cage smiling.
Credit: CNBC
