Google Introduces AI-Powered Chatbot “Bard” to Compete with ChatGPT
TECHDIGEST- Google has plans to launch an AI-powered chatbot named Bard, which will be tested by a group of selected users before its official release to the public in the coming weeks. Bard is built on Google’s existing language model called Lamda, which a company engineer stated to be so advanced that it appears to have sentience. Additionally, Google has unveiled new AI features for its search engine.
AI chatbots like Bard and ChatGPT are intended to provide answers to questions and gather information, leveraging the internet as a massive database of knowledge. However, there are concerns regarding the potential spread of offensive content and misinformation through these chatbots.
“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models,” wrote Google boss Sundar Pichai in a blog.
The platform will initially operate on a “lightweight” version of Lamda, requiring less power so that more people can use it at once, he said.
Google’s announcement follows wide speculation that Microsoft is about to bring the AI chatbot ChatGPT to its search engine Bing, following a multi-billion dollar investment in the firm behind it, OpenAI.
ChatGPT can answer questions and carry out 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 is currently free for people to use, although it costs the firm a few pennies each time somebody does. OpenAI recently announced a subscription tier to complement free access.
But the ultimate aim of chatbots lies in internet search, experts believe – replacing pages of web links with one definitive answer.
Sundar Pichai said that people are using Google search to ask more nuanced questions than previously.
Whereas, 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 does not have an immediate factual answer.
“AI can be helpful in these moments, synthesizing insights for questions where there’s no one right answer,” he wrote.
“Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distil complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web.”
