Google officially released chatbot Bard to compete with ChatGPT

Google began rolling out its first standalone consumer AI product, the Bard chatbot, on Tuesday (March 21). Google said Bard , which provides answers to text-based questions, will run separately from its Google Search engine.

Bard's launch comes nearly four months after Microsoft-backed rival OpenAI captured global attention with the release of its ChatGPT chatbot, sparking a rush by tech giants to bring artificial intelligence to the internet search business.

Last week, OpenAI unveiled its new language model, GPT-4 , which users can access through the premium version of ChatGPT and through Microsoft's Bing search engine. Chinese search giant Baidu has also released its own chatbot, named Ernie.

In recent weeks, general AI has also been integrated into widely used productivity apps, such as Google's Workspace, which includes Google Docs and Gmail , and Microsoft's Office 365 software, as well as into popular apps like Duolingo , allowing millions of people to start interacting with the technology.

Google says Bard will only provide answers in English and will offer early access to users who sign up for its waitlist in the US and UK. “We want to get feedback and gradually increase the number of people who have access to Bard… before rolling it out more broadly,” said Zoubin Ghahramani, vice president of Google Research.

Bard is built on Google's AI technology called LaMDA (Language Modeling for Conversational Applications) and is trained on a corpus of text data from the open web. It's also based on Google Search results, meaning it's less likely to contradict itself with inaccurate information.

Question-answering chatbots are among the first wave of consumer products built on so-called generative AI — a technology that uses large amounts of human-generated text to generate reasonable responses to queries.

But Google has been slow to roll out conversational AI compared to rival Microsoft, which announced a “multi-billion dollar” investment in OpenAI in January. Critics say Google’s slowness is due to its massively profitable traditional search business, which has made it reluctant to introduce AI because of its ability to summarize search results into a single answer.

Jack Krawczyk, one of the leaders of Bard, said the company wants people to think of the chatbot as an “experiment” to generate ideas and strategies, rather than a replacement for search.

Krawczyk said that Bard’s responses will not provide citations to source material unless they are directly quoted from specific websites. However, Bard allows users to Google any facts they want to clarify directly through the chatbot interface, using a “Google it” button.

The safety of the Bard chatbot has been tested internally by Google itself and has been tested with a group called Trusted Testers — consumers who sign up to test new Google products and services.

Hoang Hai (according to FT, Reuters, AP)

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