On Monday, Google announced an AI chatbot to compete with ChatGPT called “Bard.”
In the announcement(Opens in a new tab), Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Bard is now available to “trusted testers” and will be more widely available “in the coming weeks.” Following the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in December 2022, the generative AI tech’s popularity prompted Google executives to declare a “code red(Opens in a new tab)” and scramble to compete with its own AI technologies.
Like ChatGPT, Bard will query information from the web to “provide fresh, high-quality responses.”
Uses for Bard are far-ranging as it uses any information available on the internet. Bard will be powered by a pared down “lightweight” version of LaMDA, its AI language model technology. Pichai says this LaMDA model requires less computing power which will be easier to scale to more users and gain feedback faster. The testing phase will incorporate external feedback into Google’s own internal testing in order to “meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information.”
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Along with the announcement of Bard, Google plans to add more AI-powered features to Google search, summarizing information within the search page and providing deeper insights into the users’ queries.
As of now, not much else is known about Bard and Google’s new AI products, but the search giant is hosting an event on February 8. The event will announce news related to Search and Maps and is “reimagining how people search for, explore and interact with information, making it more natural and intuitive than ever before to find what you need,” per the event description. Whether that includes details about Bard and AI initiatives remains to be seen, but the race for chatbot dominance is undoubtedly on.
