Google launches its AI chatbot ‘Bard’ for users in US, UK
Google’s Bard chatbot has been described as an “experimental conversational AI service,” was launched for users in the United States and the United Kingdom on Tuesday (March 21). The Alphabet Inc-owned tech giant had originally announced Bard last month and last week said that it would integrate generative AI features across the apps in its Workspace productivity suite.
Bard has been designed to respond to written prompts using information sourced from websites and has also been seen as Google’s bid to compete with the viral ChatGPT. While the Google AI is still an “early experiment” the company was “extremely excited…watching how people are using this product in a way that’s boosting their creativity,” said Google employee and product lead for Bard, Jack Krawczyk, as per the Guardian.
“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,” said Google VP of product Sissie Hsiao and VP of research Eli Collins, in a blog post on Tuesday.
It added, “We’ve learned a lot so far by testing Bard, and the next critical step in improving it is to get feedback from more people.” Based on Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Application or LaMDA, Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models, Google CEO Sundar Pichai had said previously.
In the recent blog post, the VPs also noted that since Bard is powered by a research large language model (LLM), “a lightweight and optimized version” of LaMDA, it gets things wrong sometimes.
It added, “because they learn from a wide range of information that reflects real-world biases and stereotypes, those sometimes show up in their outputs…can provide inaccurate, misleading or false information while presenting it confidently.”
Therefore, a screenshot of the chatbot shared by Google also shows that the users are first presented with a blank chat box with a disclaimer which reads, “Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn’t represent Google’s views.”
This also comes after shares of Google’s parent company plunged by at least eight per cent and it lost more than $100 billion in market value on February 8 when Bard had flubbed an answer when it was first introduced. Google has also previously explained that Bard would work particularly well for “NORA” queries which mean questions which have “no one right answer”.
