Google is officially launching Bard, the tech giant’s own generative AI assistant and an answer to ChatGPt and Bing.
In a blog post, the company says it is starting to open access to Bard, a chatbot powered by a research large language model (LLM) and an optimized version of LaMDA, the company’s conversational AI technology. However, Google says it will update Bard with newer, more capable models over time.
According to Google, Bard is similar to other chatbots in that it is not always entirely accurate and has some limitations, but notes its “incredible benefits” such as assisting and facilitating productivity, creativity and curiosity.
When using Bard, users will often get multiple different drafts of responses from which to start. Users can continue to collaborate with Bard from there, including asking follow-up questions. Users can also simply ask Bard again for an alternative answer.
Similar to the new Microsoft Bing and its chat feature, Google calls bard a “direct interface to an LLM” and as a “complementary experience to Google Search.” Bard is designed so users can easily visit Search to check its responses or explore sources from across the web.
There will also be a “Google it” button to see suggestions for queries, and Search will open in a new tab so users can find relevant results and dig deeper, the company says.
“We’ll also be thoughtfully integrating LLMs into Search in a deeper way — more to come,” Google executives write in the blog, hinting at a potential chat component to Google Search, similar to how Microsoft integrated OpenAI’s newer ChatGPT model GPT-4 into Bing.
Google says it will continue to improve Bard and add new capabilities, including coding, more languages and multimodal experiences.
The launching of Bard comes more than a month after the company first announced Bard and when it fist began making Bard available to “trusted testers.”
In a blog post announcing Bard last month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said external feedback will be combined with the company’s own internal testing to improve Bard and ensure quality and safety in real-world information.
The company’s chief executive detailed the company’s history of using AI to improve Google Search, including BERT, one of the company’s first Transformer models, and then MUM, which is 1,000 times more powerful than BERT.
“Now, our newest AI technologies — like LaMDA, PaLM, Imagen and MusicLM — are building on this, creating entirely new ways to engage with information, from language and images to video and audio,” Pichai says.
Google will now begin bringing these AI advancements to the users of its products, beginning with Search, Pichai writes.
Google’s announcement also comes the same day as Microsoft announced Image Creator in Bing, a new image generator running on an advanced version of OpenAI’s DALL-E.
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