Google hopes ChatGPT to beat Microsoft in ‘Bard’ AI

Bard will initially be available exclusively to a group of “trusted testers” before being released more widely later this year, according to Google CEO Sundar Pichai’s Monday blog post. Google’s chatbot is capable of explaining complex topics such as outer space discoveries. In words simple enough for a child to understand.

It also claims the service will also perform other more mundane tasks, such as offering suggestions for planning a party, or lunch ideas based on what food is left in the refrigerator.

Pichai didn’t say in his post whether Bard would be able to write prose in the vein of playwright William Shakespeare, who apparently inspired the service’s name.

Pichai wrote, “The bard can be an outlet for creativity and a launchpad for curiosity.”

Google announced Bard’s existence less than two weeks after Microsoft revealed it was pouring billions of dollars into OpenAI, the San Francisco-based maker of ChatGPT and other tools that can write readable text and generate new images. can do.

Microsoft’s decision to invest $1 billion in OpenAI earlier in 2019 intensifies the pressure on Google to demonstrate that it will be able to keep pace with the technology, which many analysts believe That would be transformative in the form of the personal computer. Internet and smartphones have been in various phases over the past 40 years.

In a report last week, CNBC said a team of Google engineers working on artificial intelligence technology “have been asked to prioritize working on a response to ChatGPT.”

Bard is a service being developed under a project called “Atlas” as part of Google’s “Code Red” effort to counter the success of ChatGPT, which has seen tens of thousands of users since its general release late last year. has attracted millions of users, while also growing. Concern in schools about students’ ability to write complete essays.

Pichai has been stressing the importance of artificial intelligence for the past six years, with one of the most visible spin-offs due in 2021 called the “Language Model for Dialog Applications,” or LaMDA, which will be used to power Bard. will be taken for

Google also plans to begin incorporating LaMDA and other artificial intelligence advances into its flagship search engine to provide more useful answers to increasingly complex questions posed by its billions of users. Without providing a specific timeline, Pichai indicated that artificial intelligence tools would be deployed in Google’s search in the near future.

In another sign of Google’s deep commitment to the field, Google announced last week that it is investing in and partnering with Anthropic, an AI startup led by some of the former leaders at OpenAI. Anthropic has also created its own AI chatbot named Cloud and its mission is focused on AI security.