Google draws Bard, its response to ChatGPT
It's boring in the world of AI: Ever since the release (and success!) of OpenAI's chatbot last December, the tech world has been eagerly awaiting Google 's response . And so it was on Monday, February 6, that the Mountain View firm announced through a press release the launch of Bard, described by its CEO Sundar Pichai as “an experimental conversational AI service” .
Powered by their LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) language model, Bard's ambition is to “combine the world's breadth of knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our great language models”. More concretely, Bard will rely in real time on information and data from the web to provide up-to-date answers in a language that aims to be as human as possible.
Bard soon available to the general public
The launch of Bard will be done in several stages. After a first phase of testing with "trusted people”, it will be accessible to the general public "in the coming weeks" with a lighter version of the LaMDA model. This stage of large-scale beta testing is intended to ensure that Bard's answers achieve "a high standard in terms of quality, security, and grounding in real-world information”.
Google aims to integrate “soon” these new features enabled by AI in its search engine, in order to enrich the responses provided to Internet users. Thus, for example, it will be possible to ask a question as specific as "between the piano and the guitar, which is the easiest to learn, and how long does each one take to practice?”, and to have access to a synthetic response written by Bard, in addition to the traditional redirect links to external sites.
A clear response to the alliance between OpenAI and Microsoft, which has planned to integrate ChatGPT technology into its Bing search engine, as confirmed by these recent leaks.
Up-to-date, accurate and responsible
While waiting for Bard to be integrated into its search engine, Google is already hitting hard in this remote fight against OpenAI. Bard has two major advantages over its direct competitor: it sources its answers and offers updated content, when the ChatGPT database remains very opaque and limited in time (to 2021 to be precise) .
In other words, Google is responding to two of the main flaws pointed out at ChatGPT. Sundae Pichai underlines Google's desire to “be bold in innovation and responsible in our approach”. The famous American company cannot indeed afford to tarnish its image by releasing an imperfect tool and seemed to want to take its time… Before the media hype created by ChatGpt accelerated its plans.
While OpenAI is already working on a mysterious 4.0 version of its GPT model, one thing is certain: the fight has only just begun!