Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai gestures during a session at the World Economic Forum (WEF) annual meeting in Davos, on January 22, 2020.
Fabrice COFFRINI | AFP | Getty Images
Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai told employees that the success of its newly launched Bard A.I. program now hinges on public testing.
“As more people start to use Bard and test its capabilities, they’ll surprise us. Things will go wrong,” Pichai wrote in an internal email to employees Tuesday viewed by CNBC. “But the user feedback is critical to improving the product and the underlying technology.”
The message to employees comes as Google launched Bard as “an experiment” Tuesday morning, after months of anticipation. The product, which is built on Google’s LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, can offer chatty responses to complicated or open-ended questions, such as “give me ideas on how to introduce my daughter to fly fishing.”
Alphabet shares were up almost 4% in mid-day trading following the announcement.
In many disclaimers in the product, the company warns that Bard may make mistakes or “give inaccurate or inappropriate responses.”
The latest internal messaging comes as the company tries to keep apace with the quickly evolving advancements in generative AI technology over the last several months — especially Microsoft-backed OpenAI and its ChatGPT technology.
Employees and investors criticized Google after Bard’s initial announcement in January, which appeared rushed to compete with Microsoft’s just-announced Bing integration of ChatGPT. In a recent all-hands meeting, employees’ top-rated questions included confusion around the purpose of Bard. At that meeting, executives defended Bard as an experiment and tried to make distinctions between the chatbot and its core search product.
Pichai’s Tuesday email also said 80,000 Google employees contributed to testing Bard, responding to Pichai’s all-hands-on-deck call to action last month, which included a plea for workers to re-write the chatbot’s bad answers.
Pichai’s Tuesday note also said the company is trying to test responsibly and invited 10,000 trusted testers “from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives.”
Pichai also said employees “should be proud of this work and the years of tech breakthroughs that led us here, including our 2017 Transformer research and foundational models such as PalM and BERT.” He added: “Even after all this progress, we’re still in the early stages of a long Al journey.”
“For now, I’m excited to see how Bard sparks more creativity and curiosity in the people who use it,” he said, adding he looks forward to sharing “the breadth of our progress in AI” at Google’s annual developer conference in May.
Here’s the full memo:
Hi, Googlers
Last week was an important week in Al with our announcements around Cloud, Developer, and Workspace. There’s even more to come this week as we begin to expand access to Bard, which we first announced in February.
Starting today, people in the US and the UK can sign up at bard.google.com. This is just a first step, and we’ll continue to roll it out to more countries and languages over time.
I’m grateful to the Bard team who has probably spent more time with Bard than anything or anyone else over the past few weeks. Also hugely appreciative of the 80,000 Googlers who have helped test it in the company-wide dogfood. We should be proud of this work and the years of tech breakthroughs that led us here, including our 2017 Transformer research and foundational models such as PalM and BERT.
Even after all this progress, we’re still in the early stages of a long Al journey. As more people start to use Bard and test its capabilities, they’ll surprise us. Things will go wrong. But the user feedback is critical to improving the product and the underlying technology.
We’ve taken a responsible approach to development, including inviting 10,000 trusted testers from a variety of backgrounds and perspectives, and 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.
For now, I’m excited to see how Bard sparks more creativity and curiosity in the people who use it. And I look forward to sharing the full breadth of our progress in Al to help people, businesses and communities as we approach I/O in May.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, attends the annual Allen and Co. Sun Valley Media and Technology Conference at the Sun Valley Resort in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 8, 2025.
David A. Grogan | CNBC
OpenAI on Monday announced it is taking an ownership stake in Thrive Holdings, a company that was launched by one of its major investors, Thrive Capital, in April.
The startup said it will embed engineering, research and product teams within Thrive Holdings’ companies to help accelerate their AI adoption and boost cost efficiency.
Thrive Holdings buys, owns and runs companies that it believes could benefit from technologies like artificial intelligence. It operates in sectors that are “core to the real economy,” starting with accounting and IT services, according to its website.
OpenAI, which is valued at $500 billion, did not disclose the financial terms of the agreement.
“We are excited to extend our partnership with OpenAI to embed their frontier models, products, and services into sectors we believe have tremendous potential to benefit from technological innovation and adoption,” Joshua Kushner, CEO and founder of Thrive Capital and Thrive Holdings, said in a statement.
It’s the latest example of OpenAI’s circular dealmaking.
The partnership is structured in a way that aligns the incentives of OpenAI and Thrive Holdings long term, according to a person familiar with the deal, who asked not to be named because the details are private.
If Thrive Holdings’ companies succeed, the size of OpenAI’s stake will grow.
It also acts as a way for OpenAI to get compensated for its services, according to another person familiar with the agreement who declined to be named because the details are confidential.
“This partnership with Thrive Holdings is about demonstrating what’s possible when frontier AI research and deployment are rapidly deployed across entire organizations to revolutionize how businesses work and engage with customers,” OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap said in a statement.
OpenAI also announced a collaboration with the consulting firm Accenture on Monday.
The startup said its business offering, ChatGPT Enterprise, will roll out to “tens of thousands” of Accenture employees.
Artificial intelligence startup Runway on Monday announced Gen 4.5, a new video model that outperforms similar models from Google and OpenAI in an independent benchmark.
Gen 4.5 allows users to generate high-definition videos based on written prompts that describe the motion and action they want. Runway said the model is good at understanding physics, human motion, camera movements and cause and effect.
The model holds the No. 1 spot on the Video Arena leaderboard, which is maintained by the independent AI benchmarking and analysis company Artificial Analysis. To determine the text-to-video model rankings, people compare two different model outputs and vote for their favorite without knowing which companies are behind them.
Google’s Veo 3 model holds second place on the leaderboard, and OpenAI’s Sora 2 Pro model is in seventh place.
“We managed to out-compete trillion-dollar companies with a team of 100 people,” Runway CEO Cristóbal Valenzuela told CNBC in an interview. “You can get to frontiers just by being extremely focused and diligent.”
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Runway was founded in 2018 and earned a spot on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list this year. It conducts AI research and builds video and world models, which are models that are trained on video and observational data to better reflect how the physical world works.
The startup’s customers include media organizations, studios, brands, designers, creatives and students. Its valuation has swelled to $3.55 billion, according to PitchBook.
Valenzuela said Gen 4.5 was codenamed “David” in a nod to the biblical story of David and Goliath. The model was “an overnight success that took like seven years,” he said.
“It does feel like a very interesting moment in time where the era of efficiency and research is upon us,” Valenzuela said. “[We’re] excited to be able to make sure that AI is not monopolized by two or three companies.”
Gen 4.5 is rolling out gradually, but it will be available to all of Runway’s customers by the end of the week. Valenzuela said it’s the first of several major releases that the company has in store.
“It will be available through Runway’s platform, its application programming interface and through some of the company’s partners,” he said.
Nvidia on Monday announced it has purchased $2 billion of Synopsys‘ common stock as part of a strategic partnership to accelerate computing and artificial intelligence engineering solutions.
As part of the multiyear partnership, Nvidia will help Synopsys accelerate its portfolio of compute-intensive applications, advance agentic AI engineering, expand cloud access and develop joint go-to-market initiatives, according to a release. Nvidia said it purchased Synopsys’ stock at $414.79 per share.
“Our partnership with Synopsys harnesses the power of Nvidia accelerated computing and AI to reimagine engineering and design — empowering engineers to invent the extraordinary products that will shape our future,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said in the release.
Synopsys stock climbed 3%. Nvidia shares rose slightly.
Tune in at 9:30 a.m. ET as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and Synopsys CEO Sassine Ghazi join CNBC TV to discuss the partnership. Watch in real time on CNBC+ or the CNBC Pro stream.
Nvidia has been one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom because it makes the graphics processing units, or GPUs, that are key to building and training AI models and running large workloads.
Synopsys offers services including silicon design and electronic design automation that help its customers build AI-powered products.
“The complexity and cost of developing next-generation intelligent systems demands engineering solutions with a deeper integration of electronics and physics, accelerated by AI capabilities and compute,” Synopsys CEO Sassine Ghazi said in a statement.
The partnership is not exclusive, which means that Nvidia and Synopsys can still work with other companies in the ecosystem.
Both companies will hold a press conference to discuss the announcement at 10 a.m. ET.