Google said Monday it would soon be releasing an experimental chatbot called Bard in a rush to respond to ChatGPT, which has has delighted millions of people since its unveiling at the end of November.
Google said it will begin testing its new chatbot with a small, private group on Monday before releasing it to the public in the coming weeks. In a blog post, Google Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said the company’s search engine would soon have artificial intelligence capabilities that would provide summaries of complex information.
Bard — so called because it’s a storyteller, the company said — is based on an experimental technology called LaMDA, short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, which Google has been testing inside the company and with a limited number of outsiders for several months.
Google is among many companies that have developed and tested a new breed of chatbot that can grapple with almost any topic that comes its way. OpenAI, a tiny San Francisco-based startup, has captured the public’s imagination with ChatGPT and started a race to integrate this type of technology into a wide range of products.
The chatbots can’t chat exactly like a human, but they seem to often do. And they generate a wide range of digital text that can be reused in almost any context, including tweets, blog posts, term papers, poetry, and even computer code.
The result of more than a decade of research at companies like Google, OpenAI, and Meta, chatbots represent a tremendous shift in the way computer software is created, used, and operated. They’re ready to redesign web search engines like Google Search and Microsoft Bing, digital assistants like Alexa and Siri, and email programs like Gmail and Outlook.
The Rise of OpenAI
The San Francisco-based company is one of the world’s most ambitious artificial intelligence laboratories. Here’s a look at some recent developments.
But the technology has weaknesses. Because the chatbots learn their skills by analyzing massive amounts of text posted on the Internet, they are unable to distinguish between fact and fiction and generate text that is biased against women and people of color.
Google has been reluctant to release this type of technology to the public because executives feared the company’s reputation could be damaged if the AI made biased or toxic statements.
Google’s caution began to erode its advantage as a generative AI innovator when ChatGPT debuted to excitement and millions of users. In December Mr. Pichai declared as “code red”, divert various groups from their normal duties to help the company accelerate the release of its own AI products.
The company has been trying to catch up, convocation of its co-foundersLarry Page and Sergey Brin to review his product roadmap in multiple meetings and launch an initiative to speed up his approval processes.
Google plans to release more than 20 AI products and features this year. The New York Times reports. The AI search engine capabilities, which the company said will be available soon, will attempt to distill complex information and multiple perspectives to provide users with a better conversational experience.
The company also plans to spread its underlying AI technology through partners so they can develop diverse new applications.
Chatbots like ChatGPT and LaMDA are more expensive to run than typical software. In a recent tweet, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said the company had spent “single-digit cents” to provide every chat on the service. This leads to extremely high costs for the company considering that millions of people use the service.
Google said Bard would be a “lighter” version of LaMDA, which would allow the company to offer the technology at a lower cost.
