Sundar Pichai and his team went back to basics by creating internal prompt competitions and awarding prizes to winners, rapidly improving the effectiveness of their AI products in the real world.
Alphabet-owned Google has reportedly launched a “Golden Prompt” contest for its Gemini workspace product, which features a host of AI-enabled productivity and collaboration tools for email, calendars, meetings and more.
“Golden prompts” are instructions sent to the bot to get efficient and accurate results.
The winning quiz contestant was given prizes including a gold bomber jacket with a white Gemini symbol stitched on the back and spot bonuses, Business Insider reported, citing internal documents.
Google didn't respond immediately. luck'The company did not respond to a request for comment and would not confirm the quantity or value of the prizes distributed.
According to Business Insider, Google explained the competition with its software employees by giving the example of small business owners trying to scrutinize all the online reviews left on Google Maps.
BI reported that the successful prompt in this scenario was: “Every time we receive a new Google review from a customer, add it to the reviews sheet and suggest a response. Let me review the response before publishing it on Google Maps.”
Seven winners were selected from the competition. Their challenges ranged from tracking and following up on business leads to flagging customers who need urgent attention. Other cases included tracking invoices and receipts, helping users find research on leads, and more.
Defining exactly how Google's AI products will work for consumers is a top priority for Pichai. On the company's earnings call on Tuesday, Pichai told analysts: “On the cloud and AI, I think that's going to be a big driver, obviously, over time.”
“I think we're certainly seeing early use cases. But I think we're at a stage where we need to really dive deep into these use cases, these workflows, to drive deeper progress and extract value. I'm very optimistic that will happen. But these things take time.”
Prompt 101
The latest surge in use cases follows Google's April update, which coached customers on how to use AI-powered Gemini in their workspaces.
Given the speed at which AI has been adopted since one OpenAI product was introduced to the market, this document may be necessary.
Ordinary people are trying to keep up with the big tech companies in the AI race, partnering with ChatGPT, Bing, Gemini and others.
A Pew Research Center survey published last year found that the average American is generally aware of the use of AI, but it's mostly related to wearable technology that tracks health and activity.
However, 69% of respondents were unaware that AI is used in a host of other products, from email services to music recommendations, suggesting there is a gap in understanding.
As a result, Google has very simple instructions for its users, which read: “Prompting is an art. If you don't get the results you want the first time, you may need to try a few different approaches to the prompt.”
“From what we learned in the Workspace Labs program, the most successful prompts average about 21 words, but the prompts we try without knowing this are short, usually less than nine words.”
Not all of Gemini's rollouts have been without issues, and the Prompting 101 guide makes it clear that users may get unexpected results, adding that “before you act on any output from Gemini for Workspace, review it for clarity, relevance, and accuracy. And of course, most importantly, remember that while Generative AI is meant to assist humans, you are in charge of the final output.”
Impress the analysts
Even though this emerging technology tends to surprise developers, the market remains impressed with Google's performance.
In its second-quarter earnings, Alphabet reported that revenue rose 14% year over year to nearly $85 billion, driven by search and cloud services.
Following the results, Goldman Sachs maintained its “buy” rating on Alphabet after the update. In a note published yesterday, analysts Eric Sheridan and Alex Vegliante wrote that continued revenue momentum and “positive commentary” about the gen-AI product were driving the stock higher.
He added: “We believe Alphabet is a leading AI/machine learning-driven business that is uniquely positioned to benefit as the lines between advertising, commerce and media consumption blur over the next few years and become more useful across computing platforms including consumer desktop, consumer mobile and enterprise cloud computing.”
