Tech giant Google introduces ChatGPT competitor Bard uses online information to give fresh replies

Intro: Google has announced the launch of its AI chatbot Bard, which is currently in private beta and will be available to the public in the coming weeks. This will be a direct competitor to the Microsoft-backed, OpenAI-created ChatGPT, which has amassed a massive user base in just a few months.

Alphabet and Microsoft stock prices have risen since the two companies began competing for dominance in the AI space. Google has unveiled its new artificial intelligence (AI) service ‘Bard’ to compete against OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which is now opened up to “trusted testers” before the company makes it “more widely available to the public in the coming weeks”.Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a blog post on Monday that Bard is an “experimental conversational AI service” powered by Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA). The tech giant is initially releasing it with a lightweight model version of LaMDA.

The tool aims to combine the depth of the “world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models”. It uses web data to provide fresh, high-quality responses. “Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity, helping you to explain discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills,” Pichai explained. The new chatbot will be powered by LaMDA or the less catchy Language Model for Dialogue Applications. Google has been working on LaMDA for years, officially announcing the project in 2021. It boasted at the time that LaMDA was capable of far more advanced natural conversation than other existing chatbots. This much smaller model requires much less computing power, allowing the company to scale to more users and receive more feedback. Google will combine external feedback with internal testing to ensure that Bard’s responses “meet a high bar for quality, safety, and groundedness in real-world data,” according to Pichai.