Tech giant Google has officially launched ‘Google Bard’, an experimental conversation AI service to compete with the very popular chatbot ChatGPT from the Microsoft-backed firm OpenAI. The service will first roll out to trusted testers before it becomes available for the public, Sundar Pichai confirmed. Let us try to understand what Google Bard is and how will it work.
Google Bard
Google Bard is an AI-powered chatbot that can give answers to many queries in a conversational way, quite similar to what ChatGPT does. Bard extracts information from the web to provide fresh and good-quality responses.
The Google chatbot is powered by LaMDA, which is Google’s language model built on Transformer, a neural network architecture. Google research invented and opened Transformer in 2017.
Accessing Google Bard
Currently, Google Bard will be available for limited trusted testers. A lightweight model version of LaMDA has been released which needs less computing power and this will allow Google to receive more feedback.
Google’s post reads-“We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety, and groundedness in real-world information.” According to
Feedback is important for Google because Google’s language LaMDA was accused of offering racist and sexist responses. Although ChatGPT also offers wrong responses it is said to get better with time. Similarly, Google’s LaMDA is also getting better at responses and has even outperformed ChatGPT on some occasions.
Why Google Bard now?
Google was working on its language model for a while now, but the company paused its public rollout after its language was alleged to be sexist and racist. Sundar Pichai said, “I feel comfortable with all the investments we have made in making sure we can develop AI responsibly and we’ll be careful.”
Google is also working on improving its Search with AI capabilities. According to Google, chatbots and AI is the future.
