On Tuesday, Google’s Bard chatbot, which has been billed as an “experimental conversational AI service,” was made available to users in the United States and the United Kingdom (March 21). The Alphabet Inc-owned tech behemoth first announced Bard last month, and last week stated that it will integrate generative AI elements across its Workspace productivity suite of tools.
It is Google’s attempt to compete with the viral ChatGPT
Bard was created to answer textual prompts using information gathered from websites, and it is also considered Google’s attempt to compete with the viral ChatGPT. According to the Guardian, while Google AI is still an “early experiment,” the business is “very excited…watching how people are utilizing this product in a way that’s improving their creativity,” according to Google employee and product lead for Bard, Jack Krawczyk.
“You can use Bard to boost your productivity, accelerate your ideas and fuel your curiosity. You might ask Bard to give you tips to reach your goal of reading more books this year, explain quantum physics in simple terms, or spark your creativity by outlining a blog post,” said Google VP of product Sissie Hsiao and VP of research Eli Collins, in a blog post on Tuesday.
It added, “We’ve learned a lot so far by testing Bard, and the next critical step in improving it is to get feedback from more people.” Based on Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Application or LaMDA, Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models, Google CEO Sundar Pichai had said previously.
Bard is powered by a research large language model (LLM)
In the recent blog post, the VPs also noted that since Bard is powered by a research large language model (LLM), “a lightweight and optimized version” of LaMDA, it gets things wrong sometimes. It added, “because they learn from a wide range of information that reflects real-world biases and stereotypes, those sometimes show up in their outputs…can provide inaccurate, misleading or false information while presenting it confidently.”
As a result, according to a snapshot of the chatbot supplied by Google, users are first given with a blank chat box with the disclaimer, “Bard may offer erroneous or inappropriate content that does not represent Google’s views.” This comes after Google’s parent company’s stock fell by at least 8% and lost more than $100 billion in market worth on February 8, when Bard fumbled an answer when it was originally presented. Google has also previously explained that Bard would perform particularly well for “NORA” queries which mean questions that have “no one right answer”.
