Google is introducing a new AI-powered chatbot named Bard, a competitor to ChatGPT.
Bard will be built on Google’s current large language model Lamda. The company aims to bring the wealth of the world’s knowledge together with its large language models’ power, intelligence, and creativity.
The platform will initially operate on a “lightweight” version of Lamda, requiring less power to allow more people to use it at once.
“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models,” wrote Google boss Sundar Pichai in a blog.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai emphasized the need for the company’s AI services to be “bold and responsible” but did not elaborate on how Bard will prevent the sharing of harmful or abusive content.
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AI chatbots like Bard and ChatGPT are designed to answer questions and find information. They use the internet as a massive database of knowledge, but there are also concerns that this can include offensive material and disinformation.
The launch of Bard follows widespread speculation that Microsoft is bringing ChatGPT to its search engine Bing, following a multi-billion dollar investment in the company behind it, OpenAI. ChatGPT is a well-known example of an AI chatbot, and it can answer questions and carry out requests in text form, based on information from the internet as it was in 2021. It can also generate speeches, songs, marketing copy, news articles, and student essays.
Although ChatGPT is currently free for people to use, it costs the company a few pennies each time someone does. OpenAI recently announced a subscription tier to complement free access. The ultimate goal of chatbots lies in internet search, according to experts. The idea is to replace pages of web links with one definitive answer.
Pichai has noted that people use Google search to ask more nuanced questions than in the past. For example, a common question about the piano in the past might have been how many keys it has, but now it is more likely to be whether it is more difficult to learn than the guitar, which does not have an immediate factual answer.
Pichai believes that AI can be helpful in these situations by synthesizing insights for questions without one right answer.
“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models,” wrote Google boss Sundar Pichai in a blog.
