Google opens early access to Bard, its AI chatbot
Google just announced that the company is releasing its ChatGPT competitor Bard. But chances are you won’t be able to access the product right away as the company is starting with a limited public rollout.
Users in the U.K. and the U.S. can head over to bard.google.com and join a waitlist. The company calls Bard an “early experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI”.
Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, Bard is a chatbot based on a large language model. You can interact with Bard to ask questions and refine the answer with follow-up queries.
When Google first unveiled Bard last month, there wasn’t much to see other than a lengthy blog post written by Google CEO Sundar Pichai. The model used in Bard is based on Google’s own LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) — the company is using a lightweight and optimized version of LaMDA.
In a conference in Paris, Google explained that Bard would work particularly well for ‘NORA’ queries — questions to which there’s ‘no one right answer’. Of course, conversational AI also raises questions when it comes to accuracy, sources of information and ethical stopgaps.
In its blog post, Google shares a few screenshots of its chatbot product. Users are first presented with a blank chatbox with a disclaimer right under it that says “Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn’t represent Google’s views”.
There are a few sample prompts but users are free to type whatever they want in the text field. After that, Bard loads the answer and displays it instantly. It doesn’t feel like Bard is writing a word-by-word answer, but Google says that it works pretty much like other generative AI chatbots. It comes up with the next word based on the previous words.
At the bottom of the answer, you can rate the answer with a thumbs up or thumbs down, restart the conversation or click on a ‘Google It’ button to switch to Google’s search engine.
Image Credits: Google
This is a developing story, please refresh for more…
Google opens early access to Bard, its AI chatbot by Romain Dillet originally published on TechCrunch
