Artificial intelligence (AI) has gotten the best of Big Tech and evidently so. OpenAI’s ChatGPT surpassed over 100 million active users in just over two months and is constantly at full capacity owing to its popularity. For context, it took TikTok nine months to get there, and Instagram over two years.

ChatGPT is backed by Microsoft and its success made the tech giant to up the ante on a $1 billion investment that it previously made in OpenAI in 2019 and now, search engine giant Google has a response to this wildly famous AI tool.

In a blog post, Google parent Alphabet's Chief Executive Sundar Pichai said his company is opening a conversational AI service called Bard to "trusted testers" for feedback, followed by a public release in the coming weeks. The blog post was also a very serious attempt at telling everyone “we’ve been doing this for way longer”.

What is Bard?

Google's chatbot is supposed to be able to explain complex subjects such as outer space discoveries in terms simple enough for a child to understand. It also claims the service will perform other, more mundane tasks, such as providing tips for planning a party, or lunch ideas based on what food is left in a refrigerator. Pichai didn't say in his post whether Bard will be able to write prose in the vein of William Shakespeare, the playwright who apparently inspired the service's name.

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Pichai said the new service draws on information from the internet, which could give Bard a huge advantage over the ChatGPT which is only up to date till 2021.

"Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world's knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our AI,” Pichai said.

Bard had been a service being developed under a project called “Atlas," as part of Google's “code red” effort to counter the success of ChatGPT, which has attracted tens of millions of users since its general release late last year, while also raising concerns in schools about its ability to write entire essays for students.

Pichai has been emphasising the importance of AI for the past six years, with one of the most visible byproducts materialising in 2021 as part of a system called “Language Model for Dialogue Applications," or LaMDA, which will be used to power Bard.

Google also plans to begin incorporating LaMDA and other AI advancements into its dominant search engine to provide more helpful answers to the increasingly complicated questions being posed by its billion of users. Without providing a specific timeline, Pichai indicated the AI tools will be deployed in Google's search in the near future.

Also Read: ChatGPT crosses 100 million active users, sets record for fastest-growing user base, says study

In a demo of the service, Bard, like its rival chatbot, invites users to give it a prompt while warning its response may be inappropriate or inaccurate. It then bulleted three answers to a query about a space telescope's discoveries, the demo showed.

Google is relying on a version of LaMDA that requires less computing power so it can serve more users and improve with their feedback, Pichai said.

Google is also holding a virtual event on Wednesday about how it is “using the power of AI to reimagine how people search for, explore and interact with information, making it more natural and intuitive than ever before to find what you need,” according to The Verge.

The event will be live-streamed on Google’s YouTube channel on February 8 at 7 pm IST.

(With agency inputs)

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First Published:Feb 7, 2023 10:25 AM IST