Google Launches Competitor to ChatGPT: Bard AI Service
Less than a month following the debut of the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT, Google’s leadership issued a “code red” in response to the threat posed to its search business by the new technology. As a result, CEO Sundar Pichai redirected various teams within the company towards the development and launch of their own AI products, with plans to unveil 20 new AI products this year and a version of Google Search featuring AI chatbot features.
On Monday, Pichai introduced Google’s Bard AI service in a blog post on Google’s website, which he described as “an experimental conversational AI service” and a new competitor to ChatGPT. Bard, powered by LaMDA, a language model trained on dialogue announced by Google in May 2021, will be opened up to “trusted testers” starting Monday and will be made widely available to the public in the coming weeks.
Like ChatGPT, Bard is trained on large amounts of textual data, with LaMDA allowing it to provide “fresh, high-quality responses” drawing on information from the web. However, Pichai noted that Google is releasing Bard with a “lightweight model version of LaMDA” requiring significantly less computing power.
The Verge suggests that Google may be cautious with Bard’s debut due to concerns surrounding the use of untested AI, with research indicating that unregulated large language models can generate hate speech.
