Google unveils Bard, a ChatGPT rival

Google, today, has announced the introduction of Bard, the company’s experimental conversational AI service which is powered by  Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA). 

The announcement was made by Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet in a statement shared with TechCabal. 

Google has described Bard as a “conversational AI service” that combines the depth of the world’s information with the power, intelligence, and creativity of its large language models to help deliver answers to inquiries. Similar to ChapGPT, Bard uses online information to give new, high-quality responses. 

This announcement has been much anticipated in the wake of the launch of OpenAI’s long-form question-answering AI, ChatGPT, which answers complex questions conversationally.

A key difference between Bard and ChatGPT is that Bard is capable of providing information on recent events, while ChatGPT is unable to comment on events later than 2021.

During Google’s earnings call last week, CEO Pichai underlined that AI has been a focus for the company in the last six years. From presenting Transformers, the grandmother of contemporary languages, in 2017 to introducing the state-of-the-art big language model, LaMDA, in 2021, Google has continued to put AI at the core of its efforts. 

The advent of Bard will mean that its various AI-powered features will be brought to Search, helping billions of Google search users who perform 5.6 billion searches per day and approximately 2 trillion global searches per year. 

Google will first release the lightweight model version of LaMDA, which requires significantly less computing power, as this will allow Bard scale to more users and receive more feedback. Presently, Bard is only accessible to trusted testers ahead of its general release in the coming weeks. 

Over the next few months, Google plans to unveil more AI tools and give access to individual developers, creators and enterprises.