Google announces ChatGPT rival AI chatbot Bard

Like the Zoom video conference solution which became an overnight sensation during the Covid-19 pandemic, OpenAI’s ChatGPT garnered huge interest on social media platforms in a very short time in late 2022 and continues to impress all.

With its intelligent and witty answers to queries, ChatGPT became the talk of the town and some market analysts even went on to say that it may one day replace the Google search engine.

In both cases, big tech companies, despite the huge talented human resources and cash at their disposal, were left behind to play the catch-up game.

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Yes, Google showcased LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) at Google I/O 2021. The audience found the demo of the chatbot great, but Google did reveal that the AI model needed a little more training to remove human biases in terms of sexism, racism, religious bigotry and other prejudices.

Even ChatGPT has shown similar attributes but has remained less controversial so far.

Now, Google has announced a new and improved LaMDA-based chatbot, Bard.

“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses. Bard can be an outlet for creativity and a launchpad for curiosity,” said Sundar Pichai, CEO, Google and Alphabet Inc.

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Bard will be capable of offering more insightful answers to any queries. For instance, Bard can even help a nine-year-old learn about NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. It can also help learn about the best strikers in football and even offer pointers on how to build sporting skills.

Bard can even give an idea of how much time you need to master a piano and offer beginners a guide to start on your new hobby. However, it will take some time to see it on any product yet. The company has announced to open up the conversation technology to trusted testers before making it available to the public.

“We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, and allowing for more feedback. We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information. We’re excited for this phase of testing to help us continue to learn and improve Bard’s quality and speed” Pichai noted.

Google says it has more such AI models, including PaLM, Imagen and MusicLM, that can churn out music and images with just text descriptions.

They will be integrated into Google services to improve the user experience.

More such Chatbots and AI features are expected to be unveiled during the upcoming I/O 2023 in the May-June timeline.

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