Google CEO tells employees 'things will go wrong' as the public tests its ChatGPT rival Bard

• Google's CEO told employees "things will go wrong" with the company's AI chatbot, Bard.
• In an email sent on Tuesday, published by CNBC, Sundar Pichai said feedback is "critical."

Google CEO Sundar Pichai has warned employees that "things will go wrong" as the public starts to use the company's artificial intelligence chatbot, Bard.

On Tuesday, Google began rolling out staggered public access to its much-anticipated ChatGPT rival, Bard. The company initially opened up the chatbot to a group of "trusted testers" in early February.

In an email to employees on Tuesday, published in full by CNBC, Pichai said the company was still "in the early stages of a long AI journey.

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"As more people start to use Bard and test its capabilities, they'll surprise us. Things will go wrong," he said.

Bard has already had some early issues. In a February advert for the bot, Bard was shown giving an inaccurate answer to a demo question about the James Webb Space Telescope. This week, the chatbot also appeared to take aim at its maker.

In an exchange with Jane Manchun Wong, a technology blogger based in Hong Kong, Bard declared that Google has "a monopoly on digital advertising technologies" when asked about Justice Department's antitrust case against Google.

A spokesperson for Google told Insider that "Bard can sometimes give inaccurate or inappropriate information that doesn't represent Google's views." They added that Bard should "not respond in a way that endorses a particular viewpoint on subjective topics."

In the email to employees on Tuesday, Pichai said that public feedback is "critical" to improving Bard's functionality. He said: "We'll continue to welcome all the feedback that's about to come our way. We will learn from it and keep iterating and improving."

Pichai also said he was "hugely appreciative" of the 80,000 Googlers that helped test Bard.

Google did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment, made outside normal working hours.

The company's roll-out of Bard follows the viral launch of OpenAI's ChatGPT in November. The success of ChatGPT, and Microsoft's reported $10 billion investment in the company behind it, has sparked an increasingly tense race between Google and Microsoft to bring new AI products to market.