Google said on Monday it would soon launch an experimental chatbot called Bard as it scrambles to respond to ChatGPT, which has captivated millions of people since it was introduced in late November.
Google said it would start testing its new chatbot with a small private group on Monday before rolling it out to the public in the coming weeks. In a blog post, Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, also said the company’s search engine will soon have artificial intelligence features that provide summaries of complex information.
Bard, so named because it’s a storyteller, the company said, is based on an experimental technology called LaMDA, short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, that Google has been testing inside the company and with a limited number of outsiders for several months. .
Google is one of many companies that have been developing and testing a new type of chatbot that can tackle almost any topic that comes its way. OpenAI, a small San Francisco start-up, captured the public’s imagination with ChatGPT and began a race to bring this type of technology to a wide range of products.
Chatbots can’t chat exactly like a human, but they often appear to. And they generate a wide range of digital text that can be reused in almost any context, including tweets, blog posts, term papers, poetry, and even computer code.
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The result of more than a decade of research at companies like Google, OpenAI, and Meta, chatbots represent a massive change in the way computer software is built, used, and operates. They are poised to remake Internet search engines like Google Search and Microsoft Bing; talking digital assistants like Alexa and Siri; and email programs like Gmail and Outlook.
But the technology has flaws. Because chatbots learn their skills by analyzing large amounts of text posted online, they cannot distinguish between fact and fiction and can generate text biased against women and people of color.
Google had been reluctant to release this type of technology to the public because company executives worried that its reputation could suffer if the AI created biased or toxic statements.
Google’s caution began to erode its lead as a generative AI innovator when ChatGPT debuted in November to millions of users. In December, Mr. Pichai declared a “code red,” taking several groups off their normal assignments to help the company speed up the release of its own AI products.
The company has been scrambling to catch up, convening co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to review its product roadmap in several meetings and setting up an initiative to speed up its approval processes.
Google plans to launch more than 20 AI products and features this year, The New York Times reported. The AI search engine features, which the company said would be coming soon, will attempt to distill complex information and multiple perspectives to give users a more conversational experience.
The company also plans to spread its underlying AI technology through partners, so they can create new and varied applications.
Chatbots like ChatGPT and LaMDA are more expensive to run than typical software. In a recent tweet, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, said the company spent “single-digit cents” delivering every chat on the service. That translates into extremely high costs for the company, considering that millions of people are using the service.
Google said Bard would be a “lighter” version of LaMDA that would allow the company to offer the technology at a lower cost.
