What is Bard? Google’s response to ChatGPT AI

The search giant Google isn’t ready to be threatened by ChatGPT just yet. Having been working with artificial intelligence tools for a long, Google has now announced the next important step on its AI journey: Bard AI.

“One of the most exciting opportunities is how AI can deepen our understanding of information and turn it into useful knowledge more efficiently — making it easier for people to get to the heart of what they’re looking for and get things done. When people think of Google, they often think of turning to us for quick factual answers, like “how many keys does a piano have?” But increasingly, people are turning to Google for deeper insights and understanding — like, “is the piano or guitar easier to learn, and how much practice does each need?” Learning about a topic like this can take a lot of effort to figure out what you really need to know, and people often want to explore a diverse range of opinions or perspectives.AI can be helpful in these moments, synthesizing insights for questions where there’s no one right answer,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai in a blog post. 

In Google’s words, Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses. Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity, helping you to explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills.

Journey of Bard AI

Two years ago Google unveiled next-generation language and conversation capabilities powered by our Language Model for Dialogue Applications (or LaMDA for short). It has been working on an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, which Google is now calling Bard. 

Amidst the popularity of ChatGPT, Google has now taken another step forward and is opening it up to trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.

“It’s a really exciting time to be working on these technologies as we translate deep research and breakthroughs into products that truly help people. We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback. 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. We’re excited for this phase of testing to help us continue to learn and improve Bard’s quality and speed,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai in a blog post. 

Next month, Google will start onboarding individual developers, creators and enterprises so they can try Generative Language API, initially powered by LaMDA with a range of models to follow. Over time, Google intends to create a suite of tools and APIs that will make it easy for others to build more innovative applications with AI. Having the necessary computing power to build reliable and trustworthy AI systems is also crucial to startups. Google will help scale these efforts through its Google Cloud partnerships with Cohere, C3.ai and Anthropic, just announced last week. 

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Also read: Google CEO Sundar Pichai introduces Chat-GPT rival Bard; here's what it can do