World’s Most Popular Internet Search Engine Company Google is launching an AI-powered chatbot called Bard to rival with ChatGPT.
Bard will be used by a group of testers before being released to the public in the coming weeks, the firm said.
ChatGPT can answer questions and make requests in text form, based on data from the Internet as it was in 2021.
Bard is based on Google’s existing Lamda large language model, which one engineer described as being so human-like in his answers that he believed it was responsive.
The tech giant also announced new artificial intelligence tools for its current search engine.
AI chatbots are designed to answer questions and find information. ChatGPT is the best-known example. They use what is on the internet as a huge database of knowledge, although there are concerns that this could also include offensive material and disinformation.
“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our great language models,” Google chief Sundar Pichai wrote in a blog post.
Pichai stressed that he wanted Google’s AI services to be “bold and responsible,” but did not explain how Bard would be prevented from sharing harmful or abusive content.
The platform will initially run on a “light” version of Lamda, which requires less power so more people can use it at the same time, he said.
Google’s announcement follows widespread speculation that Microsoft is about to bring the AI chatbot ChatGPT to its Bing search engine, following a multi-billion dollar investment in the company behind it, OpenAI.
ChatGPT can answer questions and make requests in text form, based on information from the Internet as it was in 2021. It can generate speeches, songs, marketing copy, news articles, and student essays.
It’s currently free for people to use, though it costs the company a few cents each time someone does. OpenAI recently announced a subscription level to complement the free access.
But the ultimate goal of chatbots lies in Internet searching, experts believe: to replace web-linked pages with a definitive answer.
Sundar Pichai said that people are using Google search to ask more nuanced questions than before.
While, for example, a common question about the piano in the past may have been how many keys it has, now it is more likely to be whether it is more difficult to learn than the guitar, which has no immediate objective answer.
“AI can be useful at these times, synthesizing ideas for questions where there is no right answer,” he wrote.
“Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more about the web.”
