Google Bard: ChatGPT competitor announced

It has been rumored for quite some time that Google could soon come up with its own competitor to OpenAI’s popular language model ChatGPT.

Now the company has officially announced that this competitor is indeed in development. It is currently considered experimental by Google and is called “Bard”.

Bard is a language model optimized for dialoge, just like ChatGPT. Bard was, however, trained with data sets provided by Google and powered by LaMDA, Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications.

Bard “seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models” according to Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.

The conversational AI service “draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses” according to Pichai. The public version of ChatGPT lacks these capabilities, as its data set is limited to data from 2021 and before. New versions of ChatGPT are already available that are not limited in this regard.

Microsoft started to test one of these improved ChatGPT implementations on the company’s Bing search engine recently. Available to a small subset of Bing users only, it transforms the Bing search engine into a chat-like interface that has Bing users communicate directly with the language model.

Bard, according to Google, can be an “outlet for creativity” and a “launchpad for curiosity”. Google users may use Bard to “explain new discoveries from NASA” or the “best strikers in football”, and more.

Bard is released with a lightweight model version of LaMDA, which is optimized for scale as it requires less computing power. Google launches Bard to a small set of users initially and plans to combine feedback from these early testers with data from its internal tests. The company wants to make sure that the AI’s responses “meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information”.

Bard, just like ChatGPT, comes with a disclaimer. It reads “Bard may give inaccurate or inappropriate information”.

Closing Words

Microsoft has the edge right now regarding the integration of language models. ChatGPT is publicly available, and a more advanced version is already being tested in Bing. Google Bard won’t be available publicly for some time and it remains to be seen whether it was hastily put together by Google to counter Microsoft’s advancement in the area, or a real-contender.

Another thing that needs consideration is how users will react to ChatGPT and Bard, and how the actual integration in search, or co-existence on Bing and Google Search, will look like in the future.

Language models may produce inaccurate results, and there has to be a way to research topics on the Internet the old-fashioned way.

Now You: What do you expect of Google Bard?

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