On Monday, Google introduced its experimental AI chat service, Bard, a direct competitor of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Google’s AI chatbot will be tested by a select number of users before going public in the next few weeks.
Bard is powered by Google’s Language Model for Conversational Applications (LaMDA) and will rely on all information from the web to provide feedback. This in itself is a big differentiating factor compared to ChatGPT, which can only access information until 2021 and has no web access.
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“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our vast language models,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai. in the release.
Bard should be able to synthesize complex topics into bite-sized pieces of dialogue. The idea is to increase the distribution of knowledge in a way that is easy to understand and can promote learning for everyone, including children. Sample prompts from the release include using Bard to help you explain discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old.
The initial version of Bard will use a lightweight modeling version of LaMDA because it requires less computing power and can be extended to more users, according to the release. This will allow Google to gather more feedback before releasing it to the public.
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According to Pichai, both internal and external feedback will be taken into account to ensure that Bard meets the expectations for quality, safety and reasonableness. The press release highlights Google’s commitment to handling AI responsibly to ensure it is both safe and useful.
Google usually takes this approach, keeping its AI services advanced until they’re sure it’s ready to go public. For example, Google has a very capable AI image generator, Imagen and AI Music Maker, MusicLM, both of which have yet to be released to the public.
