Google's announcement heats up the race to determine what many believe will be the future of Internet search. However, no plans to merge Bard with Google Search results have been announced as of yet.
Google has made a decisive move in the generative artificial intelligence (AI) race by announcing the development of 'Bard,' a competitor to ChatGPT.
Google has stated that its chatbot will be available "in the coming weeks" in response to ChatGPT, the hugely popular Microsoft-backed AI chatbot developed by the tiny San Francisco-based startup OpenAI.
Google's announcement heats up the race to determine what many believe will be the future of Internet search. It comes amid reports that the world's largest web search company is concerned about the increasingly popular ChatGPT stealing a march on it.
However, no plans to merge Bard with Google Search results have been announced by the company.
So, how will Google's Bard function?
When people type in queries, the service will use artificial intelligence to generate text answers, similar to what ChatGPT does. Google stated in a blog post that Bard can assist people with tasks such as planning a baby shower, comparing two Oscar-nominated films, or explaining NASA discoveries to a 9-year-old child.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai stated that Bard, which is already available to "trusted testers," is intended to hide the "breadth of the world's knowledge" behind a conversational interface.
Bard is based on Google's LaMDA AI model, which the company introduced in 2021 as its generative language model for dialogue applications, ensuring that the Google Assistant can converse on any topic.
"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 ensure that Bard's responses meet a high standard for quality, safety, and grounding in real-world data," Google said.
Pichai also stated that Google intends to make the underlying technology available to developers via an API, similar to what OpenAI is doing with ChatGPT, but provided no timeline.
What is the primary distinction between ChatGPT and Google's Bard?
Google appears to have an ace up its sleeve to take on ChatGPT: the ability to draw information from the Internet. "It (Bard) draws on web information to provide fresh, high-quality responses," Google explained in a blog post.
ChatGPT has impressed with its ability to respond to complex queries — albeit with varying degrees of accuracy — but perhaps its most significant shortcoming is that it cannot access real-time information from the Internet.
ChatGPT's language model was trained on a massive dataset to generate text based on input, but the dataset is currently only up to 2021.
According to a Google demo, it appears that Bard will synthesize a response for questions where there may not be a clear-cut answer.
What are the concerns as the race to build AI-based generative chatbots heats up?
Experts have pointed out that text generation software from Google and OpenAI, while fascinating and eloquent, can be extremely prone to inaccuracies. The ability to search the Internet in real-time, including content such as hate speech, racial and gender biases, and stereotyping, could cause issues and tarnish these new products' lustre.
As OpenAI builds ChatGPT in public, Google, by its own admission, has taken a more cautious approach to Bard, possibly because the giant corporation has a lot more at stake. AI researchers at Google had flagged the need to proceed cautiously with next-generation technology in a 2020 draught research paper, which irritated some executives at the company and resulted in the firing of two prominent researchers, Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell.
