It’s official: Google is working on a ChatGPT competitor called Bard.

Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced the project in a blog post today, describing the tool as an “experimental conversational AI service” that will answer users’ queries and participate in conversations. The software will be available today to a group of “trusted testers,” Pichai says, before being “released to a broader public in the coming weeks.”

It’s not clear what capabilities Bard will have, but it appears that the chatbot will be as free as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. A screenshot encourages users to ask Bard practical questions, e.g. B. how to plan a baby shower or what kind of meals could be prepared from a list of ingredients for lunch.

Pichai writes, “Bard can be an outlet for creativity and a launchpad for curiosity, helping you explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old or learn more about the best forwards in football right now. and then get practice to build your skills.”

Pichai also notes that Bard “pulls on information from around the web to provide fresh, high-quality answers,” suggesting it may be able to answer questions about recent events — something the ChatGPT can do has to fight.

Bard in action – but that’s all we have for now. Image: Google

The rushed announcement and lack of information about Bard are telltale signs of the “code red” sparked at Google by last year’s ChatGPT launch. Although ChatGPT’s underlying technology is not revolutionary, OpenAI’s decision to make the system freely available on the internet brought millions of people into contact with this novel form of automated text generation. The impact was staggering, with discussions about ChatGPT’s impact on education, work and – of particular interest to Google – the future of internet search.

Microsoft, which has invested billions of dollars in OpenAI, has also capitalized on the moment. The company is said to integrate ChatGPT into its Bing search engine as well as other products in its office software suite. Screenshots claiming to show a ChatGPT-enhanced Bing were leaked just last week.

Although Google has extensive expertise in the type of AI that powers ChatGPT (in fact, it invented the key technology – the Transformer, which is the “T” in GPT), the company has been more cautious about pairing its tools with the to share publicly. Google previously made LaMDA, the language model underlying Bard, available through its AI Test Kitchen app. However, this version is extremely limited and can only generate text related to a few queries.

Google, like other tech giants, has been wary of a backlash against untested AI. Big language models like LaMDA and GPT-3.5 (which power ChatGPT) have well-documented tendencies to spread toxic content like hate speech and self-confidently claim false information, so much so that one professor likened such systems to “bullshit generators” – hardly any laudatory Description for technology Some say that it should replace search engines. (Google itself has explored the pitfalls of AI-accelerated search in 2021.)

The upcoming launch of Bard marks a crucial shift in Google’s approach to this technology. In his blog post, Pichai emphasizes that Google will “combine external feedback with our own internal testing to ensure that Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety, and realism in real-world information” — but the system more or less guarantees it will make mistakes , maybe serious.

Meanwhile, Google also emphasizes that it’s already building AI into its many products, including search. In recent years, Google has used AI to aggregate more and more search results and display information from websites, rather than allowing users to click and explore on their own. From Pichai’s post, these features will become more important in the future:

Soon you’ll see AI-powered features in search distilling complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-understand formats so you can quickly see the big picture and learn more from the web: whether that’s searching for additional perspectives, such as blogs by people who play both piano and guitar, or delve deeper into a related topic such as B. Steps to get started as a beginner. These new AI capabilities will be rolling out to Google Search soon.

As if that wasn’t enough, Google is also hosting an event on Wednesday focused on AI, search and more. Stay tuned The edge for the latest news – here before a chatbot can inform you (for now).

Source: www.theverge.com