As search engine giant Google is set to introduce artificial intelligence (AI)-powered ‘Bard’ chatbot to compete with Microsoft Corporation’s ChatGPT, question has been surfacing in public minds as to whether the company can succeed over its predecessor in the new frontier.
Alphabet Inc., the owner of Google, announced the introduction of Bard and further AI tools for its search engine. The company has announced to roll out the technology in the coming weeks as a response to ChatGPT in their competition to lead a new wave of computing.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai introduced Bard on the company’s blog early this week – describing it as ‘an important next step’ in the AI for the search engine giant.
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Pichai revealed that his company is launching a conversational AI service named Bard to test customers for feedback, followed by a general release in the upcoming weeks. He said Google intends to add AI tools to its search engine that would synthesize content for tough questions, for instance whether learning the guitar or piano is simpler.
A move following the footsteps of ChatGPT?
Bard is run by LaMDA, which stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications and is the company’s large language model. Google will make the conversation technology available to “trusted testers” prior to releasing it to the general public. Following a recent all-hands meeting in which employees voiced worry over the company’s competitive edge in AI in light of ChatGPT’s unexpected success, the company decided to run the product tests.
The purpose of AI chatbots is to answer inquiries and find information. ChatGPT is the most common example. It utilizes the internet as vast reservoir of knowledge, but there are worries that it may also contain offensive material and misinformation. The rise of ChatGPT, a chatbot supported by Microsoft and OpenAI that potentially alter how customers search for information, has been one of Google’s most significant threats in recent memory.
Will Bard help overcome ChatGPT’s shortcomings?
Google’s core business is web search, and the corporation has long marketed itself as a pioneer in artificial intelligence. Google currently shows text that already exists elsewhere on the Internet in response to questions with obvious answers. It was unclear how Google intended to differentiate Bard from OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Pichai said, “The new service draws on information from the internet; ChatGPT’s knowledge is up to date as of 2021.” He remarked, “Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our AI.” In a demonstration of the service, Bard, like its competitor’s chatbot, asks users to provide a question and warns that its response may be improper or inaccurate. It then gave three bulleted answers to a question, as the demo showed.
Pichai stated that Google relies on a version of LaMDA that requires less computational power in order to serve more customers and adapt to their comments. On the contrary, often ChatGPT gets to it’s limit and restricts user from using the technology.
The era of AI applications
Google’s statement comes in the wake of widespread rumors that Microsoft would soon integrate the AI chatbot ChatGPT into its search engine Bing as a result of a multi-billion dollar investment in OpenAI. Microsoft has stated that it intends to incorporate the AI into all of its products. Company CEO Satya Nadella will address the media on unspecified developments shortly.
Microsoft invested in OpenAI in 2019 and 2021. Last month, the corporation announced it would continue to work with the company and put billions of dollars into it. Analysts said ChatGPT had 57 million unique visitors in December, surpassing TikTok in terms of adoption. It can generate essays, speeches, music, marketing content, and news articles. It currently costs the company a few cents each time someone uses it, even though it is currently free to the public.
In addition to its free access, OpenAI has lately offered a paid tier. It has announced a premium subscription of ChatGPT Plus with $20 per month. Experts believe that the ultimate goal of chatbot is to replace pages of web links with a single conclusive response in internet searches.
Sundar Pichai stated that individuals are asking increasingly sophisticated questions via Google search. In the past, a popular query concerning the piano might have been how many keys it has. Nowadays, the question is more likely to be if the piano is more difficult to learn than the guitar, which does not have a straightforward factual answer.
“AI can be helpful in these moments, synthesising insights for questions where there’s no one right answer,” he wrote. “Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distil complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web,” Pichai concluded.
