Google is bracing for an artificial intelligence battle with “Bard,” a conversational service that appears to be aimed at countering the popularity of Microsoft’s ChatGPT tool.
According to Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google, Bard will initially be accessible only to a select group of “trusted testers” before being broadly released later this year.
A child should be able to understand the complex concepts discussed by Google’s chatbot when it comes to topics like space discoveries. Additionally, it states that the service will carry out other, more routine duties like offering party planning advice or lunch suggestions based on the leftovers in a refrigerator.
Pichai left it unclear in his post whether Bard, named after the playwright who allegedly served as inspiration for the service’s name, will be able to write prose in the manner of William Shakespeare.
Pichai wrote that “Bard can be an outlet for creativity and a launchpad for curiosity.”
Less than two weeks after Microsoft revealed it was investing billions of dollars in OpenAI, the San Francisco-based company that makes ChatGPT and other tools that can create new images and readable text, Google announced the existence of Bard.
The pressure on Google to prove that it can keep up in a field of technology that many analysts believe will be as transformative as personal computers, the internet, and smartphones have been at various stages over the past 40 years has increased with Microsoft’s decision to up the ante on a $1 billion investment that it previously made in OpenAI in 2019.
A group of Google engineers working on AI technology, according to a report by CNBC last week, “has been asked to prioritize working on a response to ChatGPT.”
Bard was a service that was being developed under the “Atlas” project by Google as part of its “code red” initiative to compete with ChatGPT, which has gained tens of millions of users since its release to the public late last year while also raising questions in educational institutions about its capability to write entire essays for students.
For the past six years, Pichai has emphasized the significance of AI, with one of its most obvious outcomes arriving in 2021 as part of a system called “Language Model for Dialogue Applications,” or LaMDA, which will power Bard.
To help its billion users with their increasingly complex questions, Google also intends to start incorporating LaMDA and other advances in artificial intelligence into its powerful search engine.
Pichai said the AI tools would be integrated into Google’s search in the near future without giving a specific timeframe.
Google revealed last week that it is investing in and partnering with Anthropic, an AI startup run by some former OpenAI leaders, as yet another indication of its growing dedication to the industry. Anthropic has a mission focused on AI safety and has developed its own AI chatbot named Claude.
