Google to Soon Release Upgrades for Bard AI Chatbot

In response to criticism of the company’s recently released AI chatbot ‘Bard’, Google CEO Sundar Pichai is promising upgrades are coming soon (via The Verge).

Last week, Google opened up limited access to its ChatGPT rival for users in the US and UK, stressing that Bard is not intended to be a replacement for search.

However, the chatbot failed to garner the same attention as OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, with early testers calling it “less useful than its rivals.”

“We clearly have more capable models,” Pichai said in an interview on The New York Times’ podcast. He continued that Google will soon be upgrading Bard to add more capabilities.

Pichai added that Bard will be able to answer maths questions better, and offer improved reasoning and coding. “you will see progress over the course of next week.”

According to the Google CEO, the reason for Bard’s limited capabilities was a sense of caution within Google.

“To me, it was important to not put [out] a more capable model before we can fully make sure we can handle it well.” He also noted that Bard is running on a “lightweight version of LaMDA.”

“In some ways, I feel like we took a souped-up Civic and put it in a race with more powerful cars,” said Pichai.

Bard is currently available to a select number of users (in supported regions) who can join a waitlist at bard.google.com.