Google Bard

The Promise

When Google announced Bard on February 6, 2023, the company was in panic mode. ChatGPT had launched two months earlier and was eating Google’s lunch—threatening the search monopoly that generated the vast majority of Alphabet’s revenue. Bard was the response: Google’s own conversational AI, powered by LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), the same technology that had sparked the “sentient AI” controversy the year before.

The promise was straightforward: Google would bring its decades of AI research and unmatched access to information to the chatbot race. If ChatGPT was impressive, Bard would be better—because Google had been doing AI longer, had more data, and had more compute than anyone except possibly the Chinese government.

CEO Sundar Pichai positioned Bard as a “launchpad for curiosity”—a complement to Google Search that would make complex information accessible through natural conversation. The subtext was clear: ChatGPT is a toy, and we’re Google.

The Rise

Bard launched to select users in March 2023, with broader availability following in May. The rollout was notably cautious compared to ChatGPT’s viral explosion—Google was clearly terrified of embarrassing mistakes.

The terror was well-founded. In Google’s own announcement demo, Bard confidently stated that the James Webb Space Telescope took the first pictures of an exoplanet—a claim that was wrong. The error went viral, and Alphabet’s stock dropped $100 billion in a single day. It was the most expensive chatbot hallucination in history.

Despite the stumble, Bard found users. Google’s distribution advantage—integration with Search, Gmail, and Android—gave it reach that no startup could match. The company continued iterating, adding features like image generation, integration with Google apps, and support for more languages.

The Fall

But Bard could never escape ChatGPT’s shadow. In head-to-head comparisons, users consistently found ChatGPT more capable, more creative, and more useful. Google’s caution—driven by fear of embarrassment and brand damage—made Bard feel conservative and limited. The company that had pioneered transformer architecture was losing the product war.

The deeper problem was strategic confusion. Was Bard a complement to Search or a replacement? Would it cannibalize Google’s ad revenue? How should it be integrated with existing products? Google seemed unable to answer these questions, resulting in a product that felt like a defensive reaction rather than a bold vision.

By late 2023, Google had a solution: pretend Bard never happened. In December 2023, Google announced Gemini, a new family of AI models. In February 2024—exactly one year after Bard’s announcement—the company rebranded its chatbot from Bard to Gemini and launched a premium tier.

The Bard name was erased from Google’s marketing. The embarrassing launch, the stock crash, the year of playing catch-up—all buried under a fresh brand. Google Bard, the ChatGPT killer, lived for precisely 367 days.

Warning Signs

• Panic-driven launch: Bard was announced before it was ready, driven by competitive fear rather than product excellence
• Public demo failure: The James Webb error in the launch demo revealed inadequate quality control
• Strategic confusion: Google couldn’t articulate how Bard fit with Search, leading to tentative positioning
• Conservative iteration: Fear of embarrassment led to slow feature development while competitors moved fast
• Brand damage accumulation: Each negative comparison to ChatGPT made the Bard name less salvageable

Epitaph

🪦 Google’s ChatGPT killer became Google’s ChatGPT victim