It"s been over two months since the official launch of the ChatGPT chatbot. Now, Google is announcing its own competitor. In a new company blog post, Google"s CEO Sunder Pichai announced Bard. This new conversational chatbot will incorporate Google"s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) to power its anwsers to questions and inquires.
Pichai stated that Bard will not only be able to handle answers to simple questions, like Google"s current search engine can do already, but it can also handle more complex inquiries, such as asking how to give information on the discoveries of the James Webb Space Telescope to a nine year old. The screenshot of that example also has thumbs up and thumbs down logos, apparently so you can rank the answer that is given to you. You can also apparently go deeper into that answer by clicking on the "Check it" option.
The first public version of Bard will launch with what Pichai called a "lightweight model version of LaMDA." This will reportedly use less computer power so that Google can get more feedback from a wide range of users. Bard is currently in testing now and will go live to the general public sometime in the coming weeks.
In addition, Pichai stated that that Google Search will soon enable more AI-driven features "that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats." That includes more details to questions alongside links to web sites that might have more information on the subject of the search.
Google"s move to launch Bard and to add more AI-driven features to Search is clearly a response to the rise of ChatGPT. Microsoft is reportedly going to add a new and faster version of ChatGPT to its own Bing search engine in the coming weeks as well.