Google Announces “Bard” will be Available to Public in the Coming Weeks

In a blog post from Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, he gives us our first official insight into their response to ChatGPT.

In the post, Pichai recognizes that the company “re-oriented” themselves around AI about six years ago to deliver on their mission to organize and make the world’s information universally accessible and useful. As such, Google unveiled next-generation language and conversation capabilities powered by their Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA).

Pichai goes on to officially introduce Bard, an experimental conversational AI service that is powered by LaMDA. “And today,” he continues, “we’re taking another step forward by opening it up to trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.”

Bard will use information from the web to provide “fresh, high-quality responses” to a user’s inquiry. In an example used in the post, a question is posed to Bard that asks “what new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope can I tell my 9 year old about?” Bard’s response restructures the question into a conversational response, lists 3 interesting facts about the telescope that would be cool to just about anyone, and then concludes its answer with an exciting and creative statement about our vast universe.

An example response from Bard. Source: The Keyword

The initial release for Bard will use a lightweight version of LaMDA. This version of the language model requires less computing power, which will enable access to more users, and more feedback. By examining external feedback with their own internal testing, Google will be able to make sure that the responses given by their version of an AI chatbot will meet strict quality and safety guidelines. It will also allow Bard to, according to Pichai, be grounded in “real-world information.”

It will be interesting to see how Bard compares to ChatGPT. In the coming weeks, comparisons will surely be made. We can only sit back and watch while AI quickly cements itself as the hottest topic of 2023.