Bard, the new conversational AI service, will be released to “trusted users” before going live in the coming weeks, according to a Monday announcement from Google’s parent company Alphabet Inc.
It was released soon after ChatGPT, an AI chatbot that makes use of a large quantity of text data to produce answers and conduct natural conversations. The chatbot, which was released by the research company OpenAI late last year, threatens to revolutionise how people do their schoolwork, journalists write stories, and people prepare for job interviews.
The chatbot has been such a hit that, as of earlier this month, more than 100 million people had used it globally in just under two months.
Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Alphabet, made the news in a blog post on Monday. He also revealed more artificial intelligence for both developers and the company’s search engine.
It’s a tremendously exciting time to be working on these technologies, he added, as we integrate extensive research and technological advances into goods that genuinely benefit people.
“With huge language models, it is the trip we have taken.
“Bard can be an outlet for creativity and a launchpad for curiosity, helping you to explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a nine-year-old or learn more about the top strikers in football right now and then get workouts to improve your talents,” says Bard.
LaMDA, Google’s AI that can produce prose so human-like that a corporate engineer last year termed it sentient, will power the company’s service Bard. The tech giant and scientists generally refuted this claim.
Up until recently, Google has been wary about chatbots, and LaMDA has only been allowed to conduct limited testing.
Pichai wrote: “We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA,” when describing how Bard will be made available.
We can scale to more people and get more input because our much smaller model uses a lot less computer power.
“To ensure that Bard’s responses reach a high standard for quality, safety, and groundedness in real-world knowledge, we’ll mix external feedback with our own internal testing.
“We’re eager for this testing phase to help us continue to learn and enhance Bard’s quality and speed,” the statement reads.
Rival Following a multibillion-dollar investment in OpenAI, Microsoft is also prepared to use AI to transform its own products, notably the search engine Bing.
The functionalities will only be available with a premium price plan, but Microsoft has now announced intentions to integrate ChatGPT into its Teams platform, where it will perform tasks like summarise sessions.
