Google unveils AI chatbot ‘Bard’

Google is officially launching an AI-powered chatbot named “Bard.” Experts say Google made such a surprise move to enter the competition of the global AI market in earnest, with its “ChatGPT” surpassing the mark of 100 million in Monthly Active Users (MAU) merely in two months after launch.

The search engine giant envisions becoming the leaders of the conversational AI chatbot industry through the launch of Bard by harnessing its differentiating capabilities, such as real-time updates and insightful answers.

“We’ve been working on an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, that we’re calling Bard. And today, we’re taking another step forward by opening it up to trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks,” Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said on the official Google blog.

Meaning a “poet,” Bard is a chatbot powered by LaMDA, Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications. Harnessing 137 billion parameters, LaMDA has reportedly learned around 3 billion documents and 1.1 billion conversations. LaMDA’s capacity for language generation is such that Google’s AI developers argued that their language model has a human-level cognitive ability in May last year. Google said Bard is an AI service allowing for the extraction of easy-to-digest formats from complex information and multiple perspectives. Pichai said the AI-powered system can handle factual questions such as “how many keys does a piano have” as well as questions of deeper insights and understanding like “is the piano or guitar easier to learn and how much practice does each need?”

The function of real time updates is the biggest difference between chatGPTs and Bard.

As ChatGPT is based on the data it learned until 2021, its capacity to answer the latest news questions is rather limited. By contrast, Bard offers answers based on the data searched by Google engine, so it can get updates for the latest news.

With Google jockeying for prominence in the conversational AI market, competition is expected to grow fiercer with Microsoft, a major investor of OpenAI, the developer of ChatGPT. Competition between major platforms in search engine advertising is likely to intensify as the two IT giants are introducing conversational AI systems in search engines.


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