Bard - Google's Response to ChatGPT Has Finally Arrived

Bard by Google

The excitement is palpable as the online search landscape keeps throwing new surprises every day nee almost every hour nowadays.

With Google announcing the arrival of BARD, its answer to the super hot ChatGPT, let us dive into the features of Bard right away:

A short backstory
In light of the threat posed by OpenAI, an artificial intelligence chatbot supported by Microsoft, and its own product, ChatGPT, Google has decided to take action. Using its own Language Model for Dialogue Application (LaMDA), the world's largest search engine has stated it would shortly begin public testing of an artificial intelligence chatbot called Bard.

CEO of Alphabet/Google Sundar Pichai wrote a blog post on the incorporation of AI features into Google Search. Keep in mind that just a select few users of the AI Test Kitchen app have access to LaMDA for limited testing.

In a nutshell, what is Bard, and when will users be able to use it?
Bard is built on top of Google's proprietary conversational AI chatbot and the LaMDA deep learning model. Pichai called it a "experimental conversational AI tool," adding that Google will "give it to trusted testers before making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks."

Bard - Awaiting public release

 If you're wondering how to join up, keep in mind that it is not yet available to the public at large. The speed with which Bard was deployed is especially impressive when compared to Google's meticulous and deliberate approach to LaMDA, which has been in development for almost two years. Additionally, on Wednesday, Google will host an AI-related event where additional details and confirmations will be shared.Bard "draws on information from the web to develop fresh, high-quality responses," as stated in the blog post. It means that it will respond in the same comprehensive, conversational, and essay-style manner as ChatGPT.

The ad claims that users may ask Bard "to explain fresh discoveries from NASA's James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old," or "to learn more about the greatest strikers in football right now, and then receive exercises to develop your abilities."

According to Google, the model is a "lightweight" adaptation of LaMDA that "requires much less computer resources, enabling us to expand to more individuals and allow for more input." Remember that processing these models takes a lot of computer resources. ChatGPT is made possible by a number of cloud services, including Microsoft's Azure.That's why it's not uncommon for the service to be unreliable: there are just too many people trying to use it at once.

Google says it will take user feedback and test internally to make sure Bard's responses are up to expectations in terms of quality, security, and realism. To this end, Bard is now being evaluated.

Is Bard better than ChatGPT?

It seems that distribution of Bard is now limited. Since Google is actively soliciting feedback on Bard, it is unclear whether or not it will be able to provide better query resolution than ChatGPT. There is no information available from Google on Bard's level of expertise.ChatGPT's knowledge, for instance, is limited to events that will occur until 2021. The much-publicized LaMDA serves as a clear inspiration. Like ChatGPT and similar artificial intelligence bots, Bard is built on the Transformer underlying technology. In 2017, Google released the source code for their proprietary Transformer technology to the public.

Transformer technology 

Transformer technology is a kind of neural network architecture widely employed in computer vision and natural language processing applications because of its ability to generate predictions depending on inputs.In addition to showcasing LaMDA's capabilities last year, Google also previewed a new fiction-writing aid initiative called Wordcraft.

A collection of short stories written in the Wordcraft editor by a group of professional writers was unveiled by Google last year. On the other hand, Google admitted that LaMDA was not great at generating fiction on its own and was instead serving as more of a tool for human writers.

What is the significance of the timing of the Bard announcement?

The timing of Bard launch is surely critical.

Microsoft is about to reveal that it has integrated ChatGPT into its Bing Search engine. One day before Google's AI talk, Microsoft has planned a surprise event to take place today.Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, had previously published a selfie of themselves with Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft.

In 2023, Microsoft has invested USD 10 billion in OpenAI, and with the addition of ChatGPT to Bing, the company will provide a new competition to Google's core Search business.Although it was Google that created the groundbreaking Transformer technology, the search giant has been slow to join the artificial intelligence (AI) race.

End of Google Search

Conversational AI has been called the "end of Google Search" because to the possibility that it would deliver lengthy, essay-style, and even beautiful replies to a user's requests. Not all of them are right, but AI can learn from mistakes and rectify itself.As the New York Times reports, this is a "code red" for Google, whose main product is search.

Another report from The New York Times claims that Google executives met with Larry Page and Sergey Brin to discuss the company's plans for artificial intelligence.

It's also becoming clear that a lot of people already consider ChatGPT to be superior, so it's up to Google to prove that LaMDA and Bard are indeed superior and can outperform it. The fact that Microsoft has poured resources into OpenAI and plans to provide ChatGPT to its commercial customers as part of Azure Cloud services does not help matters.

The threat posed by Microsoft and OpenAI to Google is complex.

Furthermore, Google has stated its intention to include AI-like features into search results. 'To help you rapidly grasp the broad picture and learn more from the web, "soon, you will see AI-powered capabilities in Search that distil complicated material and different views into easy-to-digest formats."

All of these features will be live very soon. This suggests that in the future, people using Google to find information might expect to see snippets of knowledge drawn from many sources like blogs and magazines.