Google Announces Bard A.I. Service, Looks to Rival ChatGPT

google bard

Google announced an experimental conversational service based on artificial intelligence today, called Bard, confirming what was reported last week. The details of Bard look to compete against the rise of Open AI’s ChatGPT, with the latter’s inventor backed by a $10 billion investment from Microsoft.

On Monday, Google CEO Sundar Pichai detailed more about its AI service Bard and how it came to be.

“Two years ago we unveiled next-generation language and conversation capabilities powered by our Language Model for Dialogue Applications (or LaMDA for short),” said Pichai.

“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 says Bard will use information from the web to “provide fresh, high-quality responses.” Bard can explain complex results in language a 9-year old can understand, such as discoveries made by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope.

The first version of Bard will be a lightweight version that uses less power, allowing Google to scale the service for more feedback.

Google says its Search will soon show AI-powered features that provide answers in more detailed sentence answers, showing ahead of web results that will allow users to seek more info on their own. They are coming to Google Search “soon”.

In February, Google will begin letting developers, creators and enterprises try their Generative Language API, initially powered by LaMDA, then followed with other models. Over time more tools and APIs will be released to let developers create applications with Google’s AI.

Bard is an interesting name choice. The word is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a tribal poet-singer skilled in composing and reciting verses on heroes and their deeds.” Guess we’ll be hearing lots from Bard in the future.

“Whether it’s applying AI to radically transform our own products or making these powerful tools available to others, we’ll continue to be bold with innovation and responsible in our approach. And it’s just the beginning — more to come in all of these areas in the weeks and months ahead,” concluded Pichai.

It would be really nice if Apple could integrate more AI smarts into Siri. Maybe one day…

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