Google is ready to roll out its ChatGPT rival, ‘Bard’
Bard #Bard
Alphabet Inc.’s Google opened up an artificial-intelligence chatbot called “Bard” to select testers Monday, and plans to publicly release the ChatGPT rival in the “coming weeks.”
Chief Executive Sundar Pichai announced the planned release of the “conversational AI service” in a Monday blog post, noting that it is part of Alphabet’s plans to embrace AI more deeply through its products. The move comes after OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT, which counts Microsoft Corp. among its investors and commercial partners, gained buzz upon its own public debut late last year. ChatGPT helped make more people aware of what AI could do, and it also made investors more interested in Big Tech’s AI race.
See also: What is ChatGPT? Well, you can ask it yourself.
Bard makes use of Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA, and Pichai said that Bard will run on a “lightweight model version” of the application so that it requires less computing power and can scale more easily to a wider base of users.
While Google already uses artificial intelligence in its trademark search engine and in other products, Pichai sees room for further enhancements through newer AI applications like LaMDA.
Read: ChatGPT to charge $20 a month for premium subscriptions, as chatbot grows faster than TikTok
“When people think of Google, they often think of turning to us for quick factual answers, like ‘how many keys does a piano have?’” Pichai said in the blog post. “But increasingly, people are turning to Google for deeper insights and understanding — like, ‘is the piano or guitar easier to learn, and how much practice does each need?’”
Google users will “soon” be able to ask questions like this for which “there’s no one right answer” and get a synthesized digest of different perspectives.
Opinion: Microsoft’s big move in AI does not mean it will challenge Google in search
AI was a hot topic on Google-parent Alphabet’s fourth-quarter earnings call last week, garnering 62 mentions—the most for any Big Tech company that MarketWatch tracked, using data from AlphaSource/Sentieo.
Participants mentioned AI 29 times on Microsoft’s call and 37 times on Meta Platforms Inc.’s call. Apple Inc. executives were quieter on the topic, and Chief Executive Tim Cook only addressed it in response to an analyst’s question. Amazon.com Inc. executives didn’t mention AI at all on the most recent call.
See more: Tech execs can’t stop talking about AI after success of ChatGPT
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