Opinion: What Sundar Pichai’s blog post really says about the launch of Bard

Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai has announced the launch of its own chatbot Bard in a blog post. However, if you read the post between the lines, it actually says the following.

Artificial intelligence is the hottest shit ever and is going to change the way we live and work on this planet in a pretty disruptive way.

We at Google have known this for a long time and actually prepared well for it a few years ago. Our AI solutions are the best.

But we’re pretty annoyed that OpenAI beat us to it and now everyone is just talking about ChatGPT. After all, did we mention that our AI solutions are the best?

To make sure you all see that, we now have to do something publicly much earlier than we actually wanted to and are now introducing Bard, our own AI chatbot. Actually, we are not ready yet and did not even want to do it now, but the competition leaves us no choice.

On paper we can do everything ChatGPT can do – even better and with actual results. But somehow it still hangs sometimes. So if it doesn’t work so well yet: don’t be angry, we’re only releasing a reduced test version at first, because actually we’re not that far yet.

But we make a virtue out of necessity, you take over the alpha-testing of Bard and train our language model at the same time.

In any case, the familiar Google search will soon look completely different and hopefully finally be able to provide correct answers and not just list pages, as it has done for the last 20 years. We also realize that this will destroy our entire business model and we will have to reinvent ourselves, but somehow it will be okay. We just don’t know exactly how yet. By the way, we also know that website operators will lose a large part of their search engine traffic, but somehow we will integrate them as well. And you better build your own AI applications with our tools and don’t go to OpenAI and Microsoft. Let’s get that straight. Because did we mention that our AI solutions are the best?

We are aware of our responsibility for AI and if something doesn’t work the way we want it to – it’s because we take responsibility and have to comply with laws and government regulations.

Everything will be different and actually it’s going a little too fast for us right now, but we’ll get it right because our AI solutions are the best.