Tech giant Google has launched its Bard chatbot as competitor on OpenAI’s popular ChatGPT, which seeks to make up lost ground in the race to commercialise generative artificial intelligence technology.
The rolling out of AI chatbot Bard will only be available to certain users over the age of 18 in a fast-moving race on AI technology.
Unlike its competitor ChatGPT, Bard can access up-to-date information from the internet and has a “Google it” button which accesses search. It also name checks its sources for facts, such as the Wikipedia.
According to Google, Bard would have “limitations” and will be closely monitoring Bard to ensure it sticks to its own “AI principles” which include avoiding the creation or prop up bias.
This is because it “learns” from real-world information, in which those biases currently exist: that is to say that it is possible for stereotypes and false information to show up in its responses.
AI chatbots are programmed to answer questions online using natural, human-like language.
Meanwhile Consumers from US and UK can join a waitlist for English-language access to Bard to try it out, a program previously open to approved testers only. Google describes Bard as an experiment allowing collaboration with generative AI, technology that relies on past data to create rather than identify content.
They can as well write anything from speeches and marketing copy to computer code and student essays.
When OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022, it had more than one million users within a week at a fast pace.
Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in it, incorporating the product into its search engine Bing last month.
Bard is a descendant of an earlier language model of Google’s called ”Lamda”[Language Model for Dialogue Application], which was never fully released to the public. It did, however, attract a lot of attention when one of the engineers who worked on it claimed its answers were so compelling that he believed it was sentient. Google denied the claims and he was fired.
It will not be able to express opinions or take on a persona, although like ChatGPT it will be able to mimic the writing styles of others.
Google senior product director Jack Krawczyk has said that Bard is “an experiment” and he hopes people will use it as a “launchpad for creativity”.
