Google opened early access to its generative AI Bard for people in the UK and USA with plans of expanding to more countries. People from the two countries can join the waitlist at bard.google.com.
Many see Bard as a direct competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft Bing chatbot. Bard is designed as an interface to a large language model (LLM), specifically, an optimised and lightweight version of Language Model for Dialogue Applications or LaMDA that enables users to collaborate with generative AI.
“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,” Google announced on Tuesday.
LLM is a prediction engine that generates a prompt word-by-word, picking the next word which is most likely to come next. However, there is an element of flexibility involved as picking the correct word wouldn’t lead to very creative responses.
Google is stressing the fact that Bard is not a replacement for Google Search but is rather supposed to complement the search.
Unlike its other counterparts, Bard offers a few different drafts for your query. From there, you can ask follow-up questions or try another query. There is a ‘Google it’ button for you to see suggestions for queries on a new Search tab.
Bard is built on Google’s AI principles — a set of 7 principles that guide the AI on what it can do and also place certain restrictions.
Although an interesting tech, Bard has its limitations. As the AI has been trained on the available information on the internet, there can be certain biases and stereotypes in the responses. Bard can provide misleading, inaccurate or false information. For instance, when Google asked Bard to share a couple of suggestions for indoor plants, the AI suggested the wrong name for one of the plants. So, user research is advised if you are using Bard or any other generative AI.
With the launch of Bard, the AI battle becomes more interesting as it pits Google’s AI against ChatGPT and more so Microsoft which is leveraging OpenAI’s tech. Moreover, addressing ethical concerns, former OpenAI employees formed Anthropic and are working on ethical AI Claude
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