Photo: iStock, edited with OpenAI and Google logos.
Google is working on a new product to rival OpenAI’s artificial language (AI) language model ChatGPT. This “exciting and experimental conversational AI service” is called Bard.
CEO of Google and Alphabet, Sundar Pichai, said the project had been underway for some time, but Google will take it to the next phase by opening it up to trusted testers before making it available to the public.
Pichai said Bard “seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models”.
Bard will be drawing from online web information to provide fresh, high-quality responses, such as helping users “explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old”.
If you want to “learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills”, Bard would be able to do that too.
Once open to the public, Bard would be incorporated into Google Search results to provide netizens with a much more intuitive way to understand the internet.
Bard will be powered by a lightweight version of Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), which was launched in May 2021.
Pichai said the smaller LaMDA model “requires significantly less computing power”, which will enable engineers to scale it for users, providing a bigger feedback pool.
He said: “We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information.”
Google promised to boldly continue down the road of AI discovery to “radically transform our own products by making these powerful tools available to others”.
Just three months ago, Google described chatbots such as ChatGPT as a ‘code red’ situation.
According to an audio clip obtained by the New York Times[1], Pichai had been in meetings “to define Google’s AI strategy” and has “upended the work of numerous groups [within Google] to respond to the threat ChatGPT poses.”
Google engineers were also tasked to build a platform similar to OpenAI’s Dall-E, a platform capable of creating AI-generated images.
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Other departments within Google were mandated to give Search an overhaul – powered by AI – ahead of the much-anticipated Google IO event in May 2023.
It’s a mad dash between tech giants vying for control, especially since Microsoft said it plans to invest billions in OpenAI.
A year after Google launched LaMDA (which is a group of neural language models), the chatbot was at the centre of controversy when an engineer claimed it had evolved.
After talking to it about religion, rights and personhood, Google’s Responsible AI engineer, Blake Lemoine, publicly claimed that the LaMDA chatbot had become sentient.[2]
At the time, he told Washington Post the chatbot was even able to change his mind about Isaac Asmimov’s third law of robotics, which incidentally states that a robot must protect its own existence as long as the protection of said robot doesn’t violate the first two laws.
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Lemoine said technological advancements and innovation, especially with regards to artificial intelligence, “is going to be amazing”.
However, he firmly believes that “maybe us at Google shouldn’t be the ones making all the choices”.
Meanwhile, Pichai concluded: “We’ll continue to be bold with innovation and responsible in our approach. And it’s just the beginning, more to come in all of these areas in the weeks and months ahead.”[3]
[1] Pichai audio clip exposé, 21 December 2022.
[2] Blake Lemoine interview, 11 June 2022.
[3] Google Bard announcement, 6 February 2023.
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