Bard's demo error and the Google Brain + DeepMind merger
On 2023-02-08 Reuters was first to report that a Google promotional post for Bard had the chatbot wrongly say the James Webb Space Telescope took the first pictures of a planet outside our solar…
- Date
- 8 February 2023
- Who
- Google, Alphabet, DeepMind
- People
- Sundar Pichai, Demis Hassabis, Jeff Dean
- Confidence
- High (dates and merger terms); Medium (market-move figures, which are press-repo
- Deep dive
- RLHF and instruction tuning (how base models became assistants)
Tier: Supporting · Significance: 3/5 · Org(s): Google, Alphabet, DeepMind · People: Sundar Pichai, Demis Hassabis, Jeff Dean · Confidence: High (dates and merger terms); Medium (market-move figures, which are press-reported) On 2023-02-08 Reuters was first to report that a Google promotional post for Bard had the chatbot wrongly say the James Webb Space Telescope took the first pictures of a planet outside our solar system (the European Southern Observatory's Very Large Telescope took the first exoplanet image in 2004); the post went out hours before Google's Paris launch event and a day after Microsoft's Bing launch; Alphabet shares fell about 8% that day, wiping over $100 billion off its market value (Al Jazeera, 2023-02-08). The error is the usual shorthand for "Google was caught flat-footed", but the organizational story is better documented. On 2023-04-20 Pichai announced that Google Brain and DeepMind would merge into Google DeepMind under Hassabis, with Jeff Dean as Google's chief scientist, to "significantly accelerate our progress in AI" (Google, 2023-04-20). On my reading (Inference), that merger repaired the split behind this chapter's "why late" question, with LaMDA and PaLM at Brain and RLHF agents at DeepMind (B05-12, B05-13a, B05-16, B05-24); Pichai's post gives faster progress as the reason. Sources: Al Jazeera · Google, "April AI update"