Google on February 6th, 2023 announces Bard AI, the tech giant’s response to OpenAI. The phenomenal and rapid success of OpenAI was a shock to the tech giant’s total dominance in the search engine market. With Microsoft’s investing almost $11Billion in ChatGPT, Google was left with no other option but to come up with a response that must match the threat level.
Google will open up Bard to “trusted testers” before making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks, the company said in a blog post. Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet termed it an important next step in the AI journey.
Bard is powered by the company’s large language model LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications. Google will open up the conversation technology to “trusted testers” ahead of making it more widely available to the public, the company said in a blog post on Monday.
LaMDA, which stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, is a family of conversational neural language models developed by Google. The first generation was announced during the 2021 Google I/O keynote, while the second generation was announced at the following year’s event. In June 2022, LaMDA gained widespread attention when Google engineer Blake Lemoine made claims that the chatbot had become sentient. The scientific community has largely rejected Lemoine’s claims, though it has led to conversations about the efficacy of the Turing test, which measures whether a computer can pass for a human.
The company gave an example of using Bard to simplify complex topics, like explaining new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old.
The product tests come after a recent all-hands meeting where employees raised concerns about the company’s competitive edge in AI, given the sudden popularity of ChatGPT.
Mobiritz reported that Google’s AI chief, Jeff Dean, told employees at the time that the company has much more “reputational risk” in providing wrong information and thus is moving “more conservatively than a small startup.” However, he and Pichai teased at the time that Google may launch similar products to the public sometime this year.
Google has described Bard as a “conversational AI service” that combines the depth of the world’s information with the power, intelligence, and creativity of its large language models to help deliver answers to inquiries. Similar to ChapGPT, Bard uses online information to give new, high-quality responses.
This announcement has been much anticipated in the wake of the launch of OpenAI’s long-form question-answering AI, ChatGPT, which answers complex questions conversationally.
A key difference between Bard and ChatGPT is that Bard is capable of providing information on recent events, while ChatGPT is unable to comment on events later than 2021.
During Google’s earnings call last week, CEO Pichai underlined that AI has been a focus for the company in the last six years. From presenting Transformers, the grandmother of contemporary languages, in 2017 to introduce the state-of-the-art big language model, LaMDA, in 2021, Google has continued to put AI at the core of its efforts.
The advent of Bard will mean that its various AI-powered features will be brought to Search, helping billions of Google search users who perform 5.6 billion searches per day and approximately 2 trillion global searches per year.