Google has announced Bard, a potentially transformative ChatGPT rival that’ll be released to the public within weeks.
Google has finally snapped and announced a ChatGPT rival called Bard – an “experimental conversational AI service” that’ll be released to the public in “the coming weeks”.
Like ChatGPT, the chatbot promises be able to answer complex questions and teach you about in-depth topics in a conversational style. But the main difference from ChatGPT, for now, is that Bard will be connected to the web, allowing it to give you what Google claims (opens in new tab) are “fresh, high-quality responses”.
Google’s Bard is powered by LaMDA (short for Language Model for Dialogue Applications). Like ChatGPT, it’s a type of machine learning called a ‘large language model’ that’s been trained of a vast dataset and is capable of understanding human language as it’s written.
From today, Google says that Bard will be opened up to “trusted testers”, but the public will be able to start using it in the coming weeks. Exactly how we’ll be able to access Bard in these early stages isn’t clear, but Google says soon its AI-powered features “will begin rolling out Google Search soon”.
So what exactly will Google’s Bard do for you and how will it compared with ChatGPT, which Microsoft appears to be building into its own search engine, Bing? Here’s everything you need to know about it.
Like ChatGPT, Bard is a chatbot that’s built on deep learning algorithms called ‘large language models’, in this case one called LaMDA.
To start with, Bard will be released on a “lightweight model version” of LaMDA. Google says this will allow it to scale the chatbot to more people, as this “much smaller model requires significantly less computing power”.
In its early days, Bard will be in a testing phase in which Google will combine our external feedback with its own internal testing. This is because, for all their benefits, chatbots have also shown a propensity for negative traits that include everything from bias to powering cyberattacks.
