Google has now announced that it would be launching Bard, an alternative to ChatGPT. The company is starting with a small public deployment, so it’s likely that you won’t have access to the product right soon.
The website bard.google.com(For further information, see the site officially) is where users from the United Kingdom and the United States can sign up for the waitlist. Bard is described as a “preliminary experiment that permits cooperation with generative AI” by the business.
Bard is a conversational AI that uses a big language model, just like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing. You can query Bard with questions and then ask follow-ups to hone the response.
“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.”
Managing Director of Google’s Product Team Bloggers Sissie Hsiao and Eli Collins, Google’s VP of Research, wrote about this topic.
Back at the beginning of the month, when Google originally introduced Bard, all that was available was a long blog post from Google CEO Sundar Pichai. Bard’s concept is derived from Google’s LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), specifically a slimmed-down and improved variant of that model.
While at a conference in Paris, Google discussed how effective Bard would be for “NORA” inquiries or those with “no one right answer.” Of course, there are concerns about the reliability, informational resources, and ethical fallbacks of conversational AI.
Google included several screenshots of its chatbot software in a recent blog post. A disclaimer reading “Bard may contain erroneous or inappropriate information that doesn’t represent Google’s views” is displayed just under the empty chat window that is initially presented to users.”
The text area is pre-populated with several example prompts, but users can enter anything they choose. Once Bard has loaded the solution, he shows it all at once. Although it may not seem like it at first, Google claims that Bard operates similarly to other generative AI chatbots. It predicts the next word to be used by analyzing the current one.
You can give an answer a thumbs up or down, restart the chat, or click the “Google It” icon at the bottom to go directly to Google’s search engine.
In contrast to Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, which includes web source citations in its footnotes, Bard does not. You can use the references to verify that the solution is correct. Google provides further results for the same inquiry if you aren’t satisfied with Bard’s suggestion. To see further solutions, click the link labeled “See other drafts” in the upper right.
Bard is currently a standalone product that does not directly interact with Google’s search engine. As far as I can see, the search results don’t allow for any kind of communication with Bard. It’s safe to say that discussions of plagiarism and Google’s partnership with other websites will be stoked by Bard. This isn’t a new problem; Google already provides answers on Google.com so that you don’t have to go elsewhere to find out what you’re looking for.
What this means is that the restricted release of Bard that happened today is just the beginning. It will be interesting to see how consumers use the product, as well as the reactions of regulators and content creators, once it becomes more publicly available.
