Ride the Lightning

Google’s Answer to ChatGPT is Bard

February 9, 2023

PCMag reported on January 6 that Google will release Bard, its answer to ChatGPT.

A little over a month after issuing an internal “code red” over ChatGPT’s threat to its business, Google has unveiled its version of the AI chatbot. Bard is only available to a small group of testers currently, but Google intends to release it broadly within weeks.

“We’ve been working on an experimental conversational AI service that we’re calling Bard,” says Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet. “And today, we’re taking another step forward by opening it up to trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.”

While the announcement does not reference ChatGPT, that’s clearly what Google has in mind. The company made it a point to say Google has been focusing on AI for years—long before ChatGPT launched in November 2022 and became one of the fastest-growing apps of all time.

“We have a long history of using AI to improve Search for billions of people,” Pichai says. “We re-oriented the company around AI six years ago—and why we see it as the most important way we can deliver on our mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Bard runs on a lightweight version of LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), an AI engine Google announced two years ago. The company will have to scale it up to accommodate its millions of public users.

 A major item on the pre-launch checklist is ensuring the accuracy of its answers. “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,” Pichai says.

Google notes it was one of the first companies to publish a set of AI principles in 2018. One principle—”Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias”—brings to mind ChatGPT’s latest controversy surrounding biased answers based on whether the user asks it to write a poem about President Trump, which it refuses to do, or President Biden, which it will gladly do.

Once Bard launches, we expect Google’s homepage to have a new look. The company’s web designers are working on a conversational, chat-based search function similar to ChatGPT. The ability to ask more human-like questions, and receive richer answers, aims to better serve the way people are using Google these days.

“Increasingly, people are turning to Google for deeper insights and understanding,” Pichai says. “AI can be helpful in these moments, synthesizing insights for questions where there’s no one right answer. Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web.”

All of this comes after Google’s parent company Alphabet reported gloomy fourth-quarter financial results.

And thus concludes an all-AI week of news.

Sharon D. Nelson, Esq., President, Sensei Enterprises, Inc.
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