On Monday, Google announced a brand-new chatbot tool called “Bard” in an apparent effort to counteract ChatGPT’s success in going viral.
Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced in a blog post that Bard will be made available to “trusted testers” starting on Monday, with intentions to make it public “in the coming weeks.”
Bard is based on a sizable language model, just like ChatGPT, which the AI research firm OpenAI officially unveiled in late November. To produce engaging responses to user cues, these models are trained on enormous web data sets.
Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models,” Pichai wrote.
“It uses web information to give fresh, high-quality replies.”
The move comes as Google’s primary product, online search, is largely regarded as facing its most serious threat in years. ChatGPT has been used to generate essays, stories, and song lyrics, as well as to answer queries that were previously searched for on Google, in the two months since it was made public.
The overwhelming interest in ChatGPT has forced Google’s executives to declare a “code red” crisis for its search company. In a tweet last year, Paul Buchheit, one of Gmail’s architects, cautioned that Google “may be only a year or two away from utter disruption” owing to AI’s rise.
Microsoft, which has announced plans to invest billions in OpenAI, has already stated that it will include the tool in several of its products, including its search engine, Bing. Microsoft will hold a news event at its Washington offices on Tuesday, the topic of which has yet to be announced. Microsoft made the event public immediately after Google’s AI announcement on Monday.
The fundamental technology that powers Bard has been around for a while, but it is not publicly available to the general public. Google launched its Language Model for Dialogue Applications (or LaMDA) technology two years ago and said Monday that it will power Bard. Late last year, a former Google developer claimed that the chatbot was “sentient.” In the AI world, his statements were widely questioned.
Google used the example of a user asking Bard to describe recent discoveries discovered by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope in a way that a 9-year-old may find intriguing in the post on Monday. Bard responds with bullet-pointed conversational responses. “In 2023, The JWST discovered a bunch of galaxies nicknamed ‘green peas.'” They were given this name because they resemble peas in size, shape, and color.”
According to the Google post, Bard may be used to arrange a friend’s baby shower, compare two Oscar-nominated movies, or receive lunch suggestions based on what’s in your fridge.
Pichai also stated on Monday that AI-powered tools will be available soon on Google’s flagship Search product.
“Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web,” Pichai wrote.
If Google does move closer to adding an AI chatbot tool into search, there may be some hazards. Experts have emphasized that because these tools are trained on data from the internet, they have the ability to perpetuate prejudices and spread disinformation.
“It’s critical,” Pichai wrote in his post, “that we bring experiences rooted in these models to the world in a bold and responsible way.”
