Home | News | Commentary | AI War Heats Up as Google Launches ‘Bard’, Rival to Chatgpt

AI War Heats Up as Google Launches ‘Bard’, Rival to Chatgpt

780 Views

By Aakansha Malia

February 10, 2023
4:30 pm
Los Angeles, CA

"If you’ve been waiting for an invitation, this calligraphy is it. Commissioned by Facebook, this is a hand-lettered design for a poster. Quote is Facebook mine "

- Massimo Vignelli

In a blog post published on February 7th, Sundar Pichai, Chief Executive Officer of Google parent company, Alphabet Inc., announced the launch of ‘Bard’, Google’s ChatGPT-like conversational Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot. Presented as a rival for challengers such as OpenAI, the organization that created ChatGPT which has taken the internet by storm, Google rolled out a new conversational AI service for a few select testers on February 7th. Alongside Google’s announcement, Microsoft is also expected to host a major event on February 8th, discussing the services of ChatGPT, after it announced their multi-million dollar investment in OpenAI in January. According to CNBC, Microsoft is expected to ally its search engine Bing with ChatGPT, which experts believe will raise a new challenge to Google’s search market power. Google, on the

Alongside Google’s announcement, Microsoft is also expected to host a major event on February 8th, discussing the services of ChatGPT, after it announced their multi-million dollar investment in OpenAI in January. According to CNBC, Microsoft is expected to ally its search engine Bing with ChatGPT, which experts believe will raise a new challenge to Google’s search market power.

Google, on the other hand, is focused on launching the LaMDA-powered chatbot for a wider audience in the coming weeks. ‘Bard’ has been described by Pichai as an ‘important next step in our AI journey,’. The Alphabet Inc. CEO added that Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of larger language models.

The AI service has been powered by the tech giant’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications or LaMDA. The creators state that for now, a lightweight model version of LaMDA will power the chatbot. Similarly to ChatGPT, ‘Bard’ will be responsible for generating fresh, high-quality textual responses from the web to the questions posed by users. The AI tool can also be used to simplify complex topics for users as well. Pichai’s blog post gave a glimpse of the AI features that will be included in Google’s search engine as he stated, the engine will “distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats.”

The blog post published by Pichai further expressed his desire to ”bring experiences rooted in these models to the world boldly and responsibly.” Being committed to developing AI responsibly, Google will take external feedback and combine it with its internal testing to meet a high standard of quality, safety and groundedness in this new movement According to the Wall Street Journal, Sundar Pichai said in a separate internal email that Google’s entire staff will get access to ‘Bard’ next week to will get to give feedback as part of a “company-wide dogfood,” or, tech-industry slang for testing or using one’s own products.

Google’s new service also comes amid announcements made by rival group Microsoft Corp. about its use of AI services developed by OpenAI. Both Tech giants are about to go head-to-head in a battle of AI tools. The Wall Street Journal has reported that researchers in Google and investors have echoed complaints that Google hasn’t released its AI tools quickly enough despite being the pioneer of technologies used to build ChatGPT in the first place. In response, , Google rushed work in this direction and released the announcement of their upcoming AI programs to the general public on February 7th. Let the games begin.

Edited by Elena Potek