Google shows off ChatGPT rival Bard
Backed by tech giant Microsoft, the controversial ChatGPT chatbot is rampantly popular, but Google has decided to tackle it head on.
Tech giant Google has unveiled its rival to rampantly popular chatbot ChatGPT, dubbed Bard, which is set to be released to the public in coming weeks.
The move means Google is directly taking on ChatGPT, which has been used to generate essays, songs, news articles and more, and was created by AI start-up OpenAI which has received billions of dollars worth of investment from Microsoft.
Google has reportedly brought its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin back for meetings to help refine the tech giant’s AI strategy as competition heats up.
Google chief executive Sundar Pichai announced Bard in a blog post on Tuesday morning, describing the tool as “experimental conversational AI service”.
Bard is being built on Google’s existing large language model Lamda, which is so sophisticated that one of Google’s engineers became convinced it was sentient. The Language Model for Dialog Applications, or LaMDA, has been pre-trained using 1.56 trillion words of conversation data and online pages.
“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models,” Mr Pichai wrote in the blog post.
“It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses. Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity, helping you to explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills.
“We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information. We’re excited for this phase of testing to help us continue to learn and improve Bard’s quality and speed.”
ChatGPT is currently free to use, but its creator OpenAI recently announced a paid subscription tier. Four Australian states so far – NSW, Queensland, WA and Tasmania – have banned the tool in public schools, because of concerns about student learning and the potential for plagiarism.
Microsoft is reportedly bringing the AI technology in to its other products, including Microsoft Office and search engine Bing.
Urs Hölzle, Google’s eighth ever employee and its current senior vice president of engineering, is unfazed by ChatGPT’s popularity, and said he remains bullish on the potential of Google’s AI rival LaMDA in a recent interview with The Australian.
“I would say at a high level, AI right now is at an incredibly exciting point, and for the last five years the trajectory of improvement has been astounding,” he said.
“I would expect the next five years to be the same. Maybe you hit a wall at some point, but it is going to be an incredibly exciting time. Language understanding is getting better and better, and you’re seeing that in Google products with things like translation, search, and ads all getting better at understanding.
“We have our internal equivalents of course, but the ChatGPT thing shows that actually generating very correct English not at a sentence level, but a paragraph level, and even a small essay level is very good, and that’s actually not surprising. Our Google equivalent, called LamMDA, shows that the success you have at writing an essay or completing a math problem really grows as you train it more and more. And what’s exciting is that this is still not a solved problem, these systems are very brittle. They can give you a very convincing argument answer that is actually completely wrong. But they’re getting better every single day.”
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