With the pilot version of ChatGPT getting popular worldwide, search engine giant Google on Monday launched its rival to Microsoft’s ChatGPT. It is an experimental conversational AI service called Bard. This comes three months after Microsoft-backed AI laboratory OpenAI launched ChatGPT – a chatbot which purportedly has the capacity to have human like conversations.
While chatbots have existed in some ways, as far back as the 1960s, 2023 appears to be the year for conversational AI. Microsoft-backed ChatGPT has taken tech enthusiasts, investors, and even content creators by a storm. ChatGPT is only the second chatbot to pass the Turing’s test, the gold standard test in the field of artificial intelligence to assess a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. As the internet and popular media are flooded with users enthusiastically testing ChatGPT’s human-like capabilities, investors, too, are awaiting a wave of new products, apps and services powered by the tech behind ChatGPT.
Which is why Google has announced its conversational AI tool. Not wanting to be left behind, Chinese search giant Baidu has also announced that it plans to debut a ChatGPT-style application in March called “Ernie.”
‘Exciting time’
Introducing Bard, Google CEO Sundar Pichai noted, “ It’s a really exciting time to be working on these technologies as we translate deep research and breakthroughs into products that truly help people. That’s the journey we’ve been on with large language models.” Google’s Bard is powered by a language model developed by Google called Language Model of Dialogue Application (LaMDA). Google unveiled this model almost two years ago.
“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high quality responses. Bard can be an outlet for creativity, a launch pad for curiosity, helping you explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about best strikers of football right now,” Pichai added.
Lighter version
Google is right now releasing a lightweight version of LaMDA. This much-smaller model will require significantly less computing power which will enable Google to scale to more users. Google plans on combining external feedback with internal testing to make sure that Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real world information.
Top AI experts have already predicted that the technology behind conversational AI will have sweeping influences on our generation like iPhone, Google search and Amazon Alexa. Products and apps powered by such a technology are not far behind. In general, the ecosystem will see a huge step up in the conversational capabilities of chatbots and voice assistants.
Internet researcher, Srinivas Kodali said, “There is a shift towards AI, because of the advancements that took place over the last decade. The shift will be visible now and the companies will want to demonstrate their capabilities in this domain — to signal the market they are not lagging behind.”