Meet Bard, Google’s Answer to ChatGPT
It doesn’t work with Google Letting Microsoft or anyone else scrap their search crown without a fight. The company announced today that it will be launching a chatbot called Bard “in the coming weeks.” The launch appears to be in response to ChatGPT, the sensationally popular artificial intelligence chatbot developed by startup OpenAI with funding from Microsoft.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a blog post that Bard is already available to “trusted testers” and is designed to put the “breadth of knowledge in the world” behind a conversational interface. It uses a smaller version of a powerful AI model called LaMDA, which Google first announced in May 2021 and is based on similar technology to ChatGPT. Google says this will allow it to offer the chatbot to more users and collect feedback to address challenges related to the quality and accuracy of the chatbot’s responses.
Google and OpenAI both build their bots on text generation software that, while eloquent, is prone to forgery and can replicate unsavory styles of language picked up online. The need to address these shortcomings and the fact that this type of software cannot be easily updated with new information poses a challenge to hopes of developing powerful and lucrative new products based on the technology, including the proposal that chatbots could reinvent web search .
Notably, Pichai hasn’t announced any plans to integrate Bard into the search box that’s driving Google’s profits. Instead, he presented a novel and cautious use of the underlying AI technology to enhance conventional search. For questions that don’t have a consistent answer, Google will synthesize an answer that reflects the different opinions.
For example, the question “Is it easier to learn piano or guitar?” “Some say the piano is easier to learn because the finger and hand movements are more natural… Others say it’s easier to learn chords on the guitar Pichai also said that Google plans to make the underlying technology available to developers via an API, like OpenAI does with ChatGPT, but didn’t offer a timeline.
The heady excitement generated by ChatGPT has led to speculation that Google is facing a serious challenge to its web search dominance for the first time in years. Microsoft, which recently invested around $10 billion in OpenAI, is hosting a media event tomorrow related to its work with the creator of ChatGPT, which is believed to focus on new features for the company’s second-ranked search engine, Bing. relates. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI tweeted a photo of himself with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella shortly after Google’s announcement.
ChatGPT was launched by OpenAI last November and has become an internet sensation. Its ability to answer complex questions with apparent coherence and clarity makes many users dream of a revolution in education, business and everyday life. However, some AI experts advise caution, pointing out that the tool does not understand the information provided and has an inherent tendency to make things up.
The situation can be particularly galling for some of Google’s AI experts, as the company’s researchers developed some of the technology behind ChatGPT — a fact Pichai alluded to in Google’s blog post. “We realigned the company around AI six years ago,” Pichai wrote. “Since then, we’ve continued to invest in AI across the board.” He reviewed both Google’s AI research department and the work at DeepMind, the British AI startup that Google acquired in 2014.
ChatGPT is built on top of GPT, an AI model known as Transformer, first invented at Google, which takes a string of text and predicts what comes next. OpenAI has gained notoriety for publicly demonstrating how feeding huge amounts of data into transformer models and cranking up the computing power to run them can produce systems capable of producing speech or images. ChatGPT improves GPT by having humans provide feedback on various responses to another AI model, which fine-tunes the output.
Google says it has chosen to tread carefully when it comes to putting the technology behind LaMDA into products. Aside from hallucinating false information, AI models trained with texts found online tend to display racial and gender bias and repeat hateful language.
These limitations were highlighted by Google researchers in a 2020 research draft in which they called for caution with text generation technology, angering some executives and leading the company to hire two prominent ethical AI researchers, Timnit Gebru and Margaret Mitchell, dismissed.
Other Google researchers working on the technology behind LaMDA were frustrated by Google’s hesitation and left the company to build startups using the same technology. The emergence of ChatGPT seems to have inspired the company to accelerate its timeline to add text generation capabilities to its products.
https://www.wired.com/story/meet-bard-googles-answer-to-chatgpt/ Meet Bard, Google’s Answer to ChatGPT
