For now, Bard is only available to “trusted testers”; however, Google intends to make it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.
ChatGPT’s sensational popularity, which has been growing ever since its launch last November, seems to have finally affected Google, seeing as it has announced its very own ChatGPT alternative and rival named Bard.
Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, officially announced the project in a blog post on Monday, describing the tool as an experimental conversational AI service, designed to engage in conversations with users while answering their queries.
Despite not revealing many details about Bard’s capabilities, it seems apparent that the chatbot will have free-ranging characteristics similar to those of OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
“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,” writes Pichai.
However, a significant difference is that, unlike ChatGPT, which can only access information up to 2021 and does not have access to the web, Bard is powered by Google’s Language Model for Dialog Applications (LaMDA) and will draw on all the information from the web to curate responses.
Bard has been opened up to trusted testers, and according to Google’s blog post, the technology and search engine giant intends to make it “more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.”
Although Google promises to “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,” it is likely that Bard will face limitations similar to those faced by ChatGPT since both are built on text generation software.
Besides being prone to providing fabricated information, AI models trained on text scraped online are susceptible to exhibiting racial and gender biases and repeating hateful language.
Along with Google’s AI image generator, Imagen, and its AI music generator, MusicLM, Bard has also been added to a list of advanced AI services that have yet to be released to the public.
