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- Google just released Bard, its competitor to ChatGPT.
- Google CEO Sundar Pichai said Monday that Bard is now open to “trusted testers” and the public in a few weeks.
- The technology is powered by LaMDA, a large language model Google unveiled in May 2021.
Less than a month after the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT was introduced to the world, Google’s management issued a “code red” over the technology. Amid the threat that the buzzy new tool posed to Google’s search business, CEO Sundar Pichai redirected several teams at the company to developing and launching the company’s own AI products, Insider reported.
On Monday, Pichai unveiled its Bard AI service in a blog post on Google’s website, which he described as “an experimental conversational AI service.” In other words, it’s Google’s new competitor to ChatGPT.
Starting Monday, Pichai said Bard will be opened up to “trusted testers” and will be made widely available to the public in the coming weeks.
Chatbots like ChatGPT and Bard are trained on enormous amounts of textual data.
As Insider’s Sindhu Sundar reported, ChatGPT is “powered by large amounts of data and computing techniques to make predictions to string words together in a meaningful way.”
Bard is powered by LaMDA, a language model trained on dialogue that Google announced in May 2021.
In a video embedded into the post that demonstrates how Bard works, a user asked the bot a question like “what new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9 year old about.” In turn, Bard responded with colorful facts like, “In 2023, the JWST spotted a number of galaxies nicknamed ‘green peas.'”
Pichai noted that Bard will draw on information from the web to provide “fresh, high-quality responses.”
However, Pichai noted that Google is releasing Bard with a “lightweight model version of LaMDA.” It’s a smaller model that he said requires “significantly less computing power.”
It’s possible that Google is being cautious with Bard’s debut because it’s aware of the issues that come with “untested AI,” The Verge noted. Research has shown that unregulated large language models have been known to churn out hate speech.
Google did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for a comment.
