Google’s ‘Wartime’ Urgency to Chase ChatGPT Shakes Up Culture

When staff working on Google’s ChatGPT rival, Bard, hear from managers that they need to work at “Bard speed,” they know it means moving much faster than they were accustomed to in other parts of the company. Legal reviews of new features can start and end in a day. A feature that might have taken a quarter to prepare in the past now gets done in a week.

For a company that gained a reputation for excessive caution, Google’s work to expedite Bard, one of its most important initiatives, has startled some staff and invigorated others, people who have worked on the team told me. 

Bard launched in March to help Google’s billions of users do what OpenAI’s ChatGPT can do: semi-automate their software coding, summarize documents and generate new blog posts or marketing copy based on simple prompts, to name a few examples. And when all is said and done, Bard will likely power Assistant, the company’s Siri-like voice assistant.

The Bard team has swelled to several hundred people. Meanwhile, ChatGPT—demonstrated by The Information’s report last week that OpenAI revenue has quickly risen to a $1.3 billion annual rate—has put pressure on Bard to move quickly.