Google begins rolling out (Bard), its competitor to (ChatGPT)

Google begins rolling out (Bard), its competitor to (ChatGPT)

Google recently announced the availability of Bard, a rival to ChatGPT. It is likely that you will not be able to access the product right away, as the company is starting with a limited public release.

Visitors from the United States and the United Kingdom can sign up for a waitlist at bard.google.com. According to the startup, Bard is an “early experiment that allows you to collaborate with generative artificial intelligence.”.

Bard is a chatbot developed using a broad language model, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot. Bard will respond to your questions, and you are welcome to ask further questions if you need further clarification.

“Bard can help you become more productive, develop ideas more quickly, and satisfy your curiosity. In a blog post, Sissie Hsiao, Google’s VP of Product, and Eli Collins, Google’s VP of Research, state, “You might ask Bard to provide you with ideas for meeting your goal of reading more books this year, explain quantum physics in simple terms, or inspire your creativity by writing a blog.”

There wasn’t much to see when Google originally introduced Bard last month other than a lengthy blog post by Google CEO Sundar Pichai. A lightweight and improved version of Google’s LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), which is the basis for the model used in Bard.

Google explained that Bard would do particularly well on “NORA” queries—questions with “no one right answer”—at a conference in Paris. Naturally, there are concerns about conversational AI’s accuracy, knowledge sources, and ethical workarounds.

Google included a couple screenshots of its chatbot product in its blog post. The first thing users see is a blank chatbox with the disclaimer, “Bard may display erroneous or inflammatory information that doesn’t represent Google’s views,” directly underneath it.

Although there are a few example prompts, users are free to enter any information in the text area. The solution is then loaded by Bard and displayed all at once. Although Bard isn’t writing a word-for-word response, Google claims that it functions quite similarly to other generative AI chatbots. Using the words before it, it generates the next word.

You can give the response a thumbs up or down, start a new discussion, or click the “Google It” button to go to Google’s search page at the bottom of the response.

Bard doesn’t contain footnotes with links to web sources as Microsoft’s Bing chatbot does. You can verify the veracity of the response using those footnotes. If Bard’s response doesn’t satisfy you, Google also allows you to browse several reactions to the same question. To load additional responses, click the “See other drafts” link in the top right corner.

Bard now exists independently of Google’s search engine. From the search results, it appears that you cannot communicate with Bard. Yet Bard will undoubtedly spark some discussions about plagiarism and the connection between Google and outside websites. As Google already tries to provide immediate answers on Google.com without requiring users to visit another website, this isn’t a brand-new problem.

In other words, Bard’s limited release today is just the beginning of a protracted process. When the product is more generally accessible, it will be interesting to see how users interact with it as well as how regulators and content producers react to Google’s new offering.