Google has finally opened up about its artificial intelligence (AI) based chatbot project to compete with ChatGPT. The project is called Bard and will be available to the public in the next few weeks.
Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai calls Bard an "experimental conversational AI service" that will answer questions and take part in conversations. This service will be made available to selected testers prior to its public launch.
"Bard seeks to combine the breadth of world knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models. These (tools) draw information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses," Pichai said in his blog post as quoted by The Guardian, Tuesday (7/2/2023).
Just like ChatGPT, Bard is also powered by large language models (LLM). In Bard's case, this chatbot uses a lighter version of LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) which requires less computing power so it can be used by many people.
In his blog post, Pichai provides several examples of interactions with Bard. For example, Bard could answer questions about how to explain James Webb's latest invention of the telescope to nine-year-olds, or find out who the best soccer striker is today.
Pichai also said that the latest AI technologies from Google -- such as LaMDA, PaLM, Imagen image generator, and MusicLM music creator -- will be brought to its search engine. AI support for this search engine will be able to summarize complex information and multiple points of view in a format that is easier to understand.
From the examples shared by Google, questions like 'easier to learn the piano or guitar' will be answered with answers that look more like conversations, rather than rows of links to articles on the web.
This Google announcement comes at a time when Microsoft is preparing to launch a new line of products using the brains behind ChatGPT. Microsoft alone has poured billions of dollars into OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and DALL-E.
The circulating screenshots also show how Microsoft integrates ChatGPT in the Bing search engine. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said he would announce more details in a press conference on Tuesday.