Proponents of ChatGPT have argued that OpenAI’s chatbot will ultimately grow intelligent enough to kill off Google, so it may come as no surprise that the search giant has already been hard at work on its own version. Announced by Sundar Pichai (CEO of Google and holding company Alphabet) in a message titled “An important next step on our AI journey” today, Bard is an experimental conversational AI service in development at Google that, while not directly referenced by the executive, is clearly meant to be a rival to ChatGPT, enabling similar benefits that include quick answers to just about any question that a user might have in mind. Bard is powered by Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), a family of conversational neural language models that Google announced in 2021.
From The Keyword, Google’s official blog:
It’s a really exciting time to be working on these technologies as we translate deep research and breakthroughs into products that truly help people. That’s the journey we’ve been on with large language models. Two years ago we unveiled next-generation language and conversation capabilities powered by our Language Model for Dialogue Applications (or LaMDA for short).
We’ve been working on an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, that we’re calling Bard. 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.
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. Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity, helping you to explain new 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.
We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback. 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. We’re excited for this phase of testing to help us continue to learn and improve Bard’s quality and speed.