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Google grants public access to its Bard AI as an early experiment making it a direct ChatGPT rival

Alphabet Inc.’s Google is making its ChatGPT competitor, the conversational AI service known as Bard, available to the public. Google grants public access to  Bard AI. The product won’t be available right away as the company is starting with a limited public rollout.

Users in the United Kingdom and the United States can join a waitlist at bard.google.com. The company describes Bard AI as an “early experiment that allows you to collaborate with generative AI.” And here, people will be added on a rolling basis. Bard is Google’s attempt to catch up to OpenAI Inc. in the artificial intelligence race. Bard, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, is a chatbot based on a large language model. Users can interact with Bard to ask questions and refine the answers with follow-up questions.

“You can use Bard to boost your productivity, accelerate your ideas and fuel your curiosity. You might ask Bard to give you tips to reach your goal of reading more books this year, explain quantum physics in simple terms, or spark your creativity by outlining a blog post,” Google VP of Product Sissie Hsiao and Google VP of Research Eli Collins wrote in a blog post. Google has been working on generative AI for years and the company is catching up to OpenAI and its backer Microsoft Corp. When Google first unveiled Bard, the only thing to see was a lengthy blog post written by Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Bard’s model is based on Google’s own LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). This conversational AI raises concerns about accuracy, information sources, and ethical stopgaps. Google claims that Bard works similarly to other generative AI chatbots. Based on the previous words, it generates the next word. Users can rate the answer with a thumbs up or thumbs down, restart the conversation, or click on a “Google It” button to switch to Google’s search engine at the bottom of the answer. Bard is currently a separate product from Google’s search engine. From the search results, it appears that you are unable to interact with Bard. However, Bard will almost certainly spark some debates about plagiarism and Google’s relationship with third-party websites. This isn’t a new problem; Google already attempts to provide instant answers on Google.com without requiring users to visit a separate website.