Google is now granting the public access to its conversational AI service called Bard, its competitor to OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Users in the US and UK can sign up for a waitlist, the company said on Tuesday, March 21, in a blog post, and people will be added on a rolling basis. Bard is Google’s effort to make up lost ground to OpenAI Inc in the artificial intelligence (AI) race.

Google described its service as an “early experiment” to let users collaborate with generative AI technology. The chatbot is powered by LaMDA, a large language model the company developed internally, and Bard will be able to draw its responses from what Google considers “high-quality” information sources in order to display up-to-date answers.

Google developed Bard in line with the company’s AI principles, and its demonstrations included a prominent warning at the bottom of its chat window: “Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn’t represent Google’s views.”

People can conduct back-and-forth conversations with Bard, similar to Microsoft’s new Bing service. According to Bloomberg, Eli Collins, Google’s Vice President of Research for Bard, said the company is initially limiting the length of conversations for safety reasons. Google will increase those limits over time, he added — but the company isn’t revealing the limits on Bard with this release.

Also Read: Google grants early access to AI-powered Bard to select Pixel Superfans

Reuters reported that Bard produces blocks of text when asked a question as opposed to ChatGPT’s word-by-word typing, which has a more natural feel to it.

“Bard also included a feature showing three different versions or 'drafts' of any given answer among which users could toggle, and it displayed a button stating 'Google it,' should a user desire web results for a query,” it added.

Unlike ChatGPT, Bard is not proficient in generating computer code, Google said on its website.

Hong Kong-based reverse engineer Jane Manchun Wong confirmed this when she asked Bard to write a function to add two numbers and it failed.

Google Bard can’t write a function that adds two numbers pic.twitter.com/t1B1WHRPrr

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) March 21, 2023

In its testing, The Verge also found something similar where the chatbot “couldn’t write a Javascript bookmarklet to automatically copy the URL of the current webpage.”

“Bard happily drafted a bunch of boring blog posts and work emails, including one in which I announced to the world that I’d sold my chatbot company to Google,” the report added.

Also Read: Google Bard — What is this conversational AI service and how is it different from ChatGPT?

Wong shared another screenshot of her conversation with the AI showing a really bad sense of humour.

Google Bard’s jokes about ChatGPT pic.twitter.com/ctSqV8bhRT

— Jane Manchun Wong (@wongmjane) March 21, 2023

The Washington Post tech columnist Geoffrey Fowler had a similar experience when he asked Bard to tell him a joke about Washington and it replied “What do you call a Washington, D.C. resident who’s always late? A Washing-ton. This joke is funny because it plays on the word ‘Washington’ and the fact that the city is known for its traffic.”

Reuters also mentioned that Bard produced nine paragraphs of text when asked for four in another.

Bloomberg reporters ran a number of different prompts on Bard, probing its capabilities and weaknesses with both silly and serious examples. Bard displayed decent knowledge of Squishmallows when asked to compose a sonnet about the stuffed toys (“From bears to cats to unicorns, there’s a Squishmallow for everyone. So snuggle up with one today and let your cares melt away,” it wrote, in part).

Also Read: This is how Ernie and ChatGPT responded when asked about global leaders

Tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee shared his experience in a tweet saying that Bing is way ahead of Google in this context.

The Verge agreed in its demo, saying, “noticeably worse tool than Bing, at least when it comes to surfacing useful information from around the internet. Bard is wrong a lot. And when it’s right, it’s often in the dullest way possible.”

Several Twitter users also pointed out the same where Bard confidently gave wrong answers.

Here’s Bard vs GPT-4 on a riddle I came up with. The test was for whether it would say “8 bananas” (incorrect) or “need more info” (correct). GPT-4 nails it, Bard fails in every way possible. pic.twitter.com/iBtrFXG9k2

— Spencer Schiff (@SpencerKSchiff) March 21, 2023

i asked bard when it'll (inevitably) be shut down by google

turns out it's already been shut down due to lack of adoption