Google launched Bard chatbot in a bid to rival ChatGPT

• Google has launched Bard to compete with ChatGPT.
• In race to commercialize Generative AI Technology.
• Chatbot will operate independently of its Google Search engine.

Google has launched the Bard chatbot in an attempt to compete with OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT in the race to commercialise generative artificial intelligence technology. On Tuesday, the tech giant began rolling out the chatbot, its first standalone consumer AI product.

Google stated that Bard, which answers text-based questions, will operate independently of its Google Search engine. Its release comes nearly four months after Microsoft-backed rival OpenAI drew international attention with the public release of its chatbot, ChatGPT, sparking a rush by tech titans to bring powerful new language-based artificial intelligence to the internet search business.

OpenAI revealed its new language model, GPT-4, last week, which users can access via a premium version of ChatGPT and Microsoft’s search engine Bing. Baidu, the Chinese search giant, has also released its own chatbot, Ernie, which it touts as a Chinese-language alternative to ChatGPT.

In recent weeks, generative AI has been integrated into widely used productivity applications such as Google Workspace, which includes Google Docs and Gmail, and Microsoft’s Office 365 software, as well as popular apps such as Duolingo, allowing millions of people to interact with the technology. Google said Bard will generate answers only in English — not computer code or other languages — and will be available to users who sign up for its waitlist in the United States and the United Kingdom on a first-come, first-served basis.

“We want to get feedback and gradually phase up the number of people who have access to Bard,” said Zoubin Ghahramani, vice-president of Google Research.

“And the reason for that is we really want to be able to test and learn from that before we roll it out very widely.”

We’re expanding access to Bard in US + UK with more countries ahead, it’s an early experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI. Hope Bard sparks more creativity and curiosity, and will get better with feedback. Sign up: https://t.co/C1ibWrqTDr https://t.co/N8Dzx1m0fc

— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) March 21, 2023

Bard is based on Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) technology known as LaMDA, or Language Model for Dialogue Applications, and was trained using text data from the open web. It is also trained using Google Search results, which means it is less likely to contradict itself with incorrect information.

Question-answer Chatbots were among the first consumer products built on top of generative AI — a technology that uses massive amounts of human-generated text to generate plausible responses to queries. However, Google has been slower to release conversational AI than its rival Microsoft, which announced a “multibillion dollar” investment in OpenAI in January. Critics argue that Google’s hugely profitable search business prevents it from introducing generative AI because of its ability to summarise search results into a single answer.

One of the project’s leads, Jack Krawczyk, said the company wanted people to think of the chatbot as a “experiment” to generate ideas and strategies, rather than a replacement for search. He explained that this was due to the same limitations that models like GPT-4 are known to have, such as hallucinations or made-up information, as well as biases gleaned from the data they were trained on. The models are also not fully updated with real-time data from the web, so they tend to lag behind the present, resulting in some inaccuracies.

Krawczyk stated that unless they were directly quoting from specific websites, Bard’s answers would not include citations to source material. However, using a “Google it” button, Bard allows users to Google any facts they want to clarify directly through the chatbot interface.

Google announced AI enhancements to Google Workspace — which includes Google Docs, Gmail, and Excel competitor Sheets — last week, demonstrating how its tools can write emails based on a few prompts and different tones.

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