Bard, which is opening to testers, will be powered by LaMDA.
Google on Monday announced its experimental conversational artificial intelligence chatbot service, which it calls Bard. With this launch, Google is seen to give competition to Microsoft-backed ChatGPT which recently exploded in popularity.
Bard will be powered by LaMDA, which is short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications that Google unveiled two years ago. The chief executive officer of Alphabet, the parent of Google, said in a blog post that the company is opening the AI services testers before making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.
“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses,” Pichai said. He referred to the AI services as “an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity.”
Additionally, Google is initially rolling out Bard with its lightweight model version of LaMDA which it says requires significantly less computing power, enabling the company to scale to more users and allowing for more feedback. The American multinational tech giant added that it will further combine the external feedback with its internal testing “to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information.”
Bard is seen as Google’s answer to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has been in the limelight since its launch in November last year. Short for Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer, ChatGPT is a popular AI text generator and has been a center of attention for many due to its human-like response. As per its website, the “conversational” AI app answers “followup questions, admit its mistakes, challenge incorrect premises, and reject inappropriate requests.”
American multinational tech giant Microsoft has announced a “multibillion dollar investment” in OpenAI. While the actual amount and terms of the deal are still unclear, some reports suggest that Microsoft will invest $10 billion in OpenAI.
