Google is developing a new “conversational AI” service called Bard, a rival to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the company Announced on Monday. Unlike Google Search, which presents you with a list of links when you search for something, Bard will be able to answer more complex questions directly. For example, you’ll be able to make comparisons between two movies or help you plan lunch based on what’s in your fridge.
“Bard can be an outlet for creativity and a launch pad for curiosity, helping you explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about soccer’s best forwards in this moment, and then get exercises to develop your skills,” Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a post. blog post. He added that the company was taking steps to ensure that Bard’s responses “meet a high standard of quality, security, and robustness to real-world data.”
Bard will be available to the general public “in the coming weeks,” Google said. Currently, only Google “trusted testers” can use it. A Google spokesperson told BuzzFeed News these testers were a diverse group of people outside the company who use its products to help understand how regular users are likely to experience them.
Bard is powered by LaMDA, an experimental technology that Google has only tested internally so far, and that one of its engineers last year reclaimed it was consistant”. Since then, the claim has been discredited.
Google’s announcement highlights the pressure the company is feeling as a result of the popularity of ChatGPT, created by San Francisco-based OpenAI. OpenAI is backed, in part, by tech giant Microsoft, which reportedly is integrating ChatGPT into its search engine, Bing. Launched in November, ChatGPT has more than 30 million users and receives around 5 million hits a day, according to a New York Times. report.
The popularity of ChatGPT has raised alarm bells within Google, which views a chatbot that directly answers people’s questions rather than requiring them to navigate search results pages as an existential threat to its business. Last year, the direction of Google supposedly declared an internal “code red” and expedited work on various AI projects. Last week, it was reported that Google has invested more than $300 million at Anthropic, an AI startup founded in 2021 by former OpenAI executives.
One of the biggest differences between Google’s Bard and OpenAI’s ChatGPT seems to be Bard’s ability to pull information from the web to provide answers to questions about current events, which ChatGPT doesn’t do a very good job of.
Google will also integrate AI-generated answers to complex questions directly into search, the company said. This is what it looks like: