Google Bard – Google’s Answer To ChatGPT & New AI-Powered Search Engine
Google brings a new conversational AI chatbot, Google Bard – Here’s everything you need to know.
ChatGPT has been making waves since it was officially available. Everyone was comparing it with Google and calling it the next big thing. It seemed like Google had missed the boat with conversational AI. But Google has been working on conversational AI models for the past decade, and most people have seemed to forget about it.
It was inevitable that Google would come up with its own conversational AI tool and integrate it with Google Search, the company’s primary product.
But Google had another attack cooking from its Search Engine competitor, Bing. Microsoft Bing has remained in the shadows all these years, only to bring the fight to Google in conversational AI on search by integrating ChatGPT itself (not exactly ChatGPT, but similar) to its search engine.
Google preemptively announced its intention to integrate AI-generated search results and its AI chatbot Google Bard just before Microsoft’s New Bing announcement.
Let us look at what exactly Google Bard is and how Google will evolve into the world of AI.
NOTE: Also read our next post: New Bing: Everything you need to know.
Google Bard
Google announced on February 6 the launch of Google Bard, an AI chatbot that rivals ChatGPT. Google made the announcement via a blog post on its official blog.
Google Bard is a conversational AI tool powered by Google’s LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) AI model. LaMDA was unveiled two years back, the equivalent of GPT3 from Google.
Google mentioned in the blog post that it would first bring the lightweight model version of LaMDA for Google Bard. It is a much smaller AI model and requires significantly less computing power, which Google says will enable it to scale to more users and gather more feedback.
Google shows an example on the GIF it provided on the blog post. It works more of less like the same as that of ChatGPT. Google is yet to announce a launch date for Google Bard.
AI Integration On Search
Google is not just stopping at an AI chatbot; it brings AI-generated responses directly to Google search results.
As you can see from the image above, Google search results would look drastically different from what we currently know with the introduction of AI-generated responses to search queries. The existing search results section will be pushed down to allow AI-generated answers. Google says this feature will soon roll out to Google Search, but it did not mention any specific launch date.
A Blunder At Launch!
In other news, Google has gotten into the news for the wrong reasons with Google Bard already. Google posted a short GIF of Bard in action on Twitter, which describes Bard as the “launchpad for curiosity”. In that ad, Bard can be seen given a prompt: “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my 9-year-old about?”
Bard responds with many responses, but one suggests that JWST was used to take the first pictures of exoplanets. This is inaccurate, as the first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory’s VLT (Very Large Telescope).
This sounds really bad for a new AI tool, which is supposed to be at the forefront of Google’s AI ambitions. AI chatbots are unreliable in terms of the accuracy of the information it provides; we know that already from ChatGPT. But making such an error on the marketing materials itself doesn’t look good for Google. Especially since Microsoft has announced not only its AI-powered search advancements but also a suite of AI-powered solutions, and it seems like Microsoft has the upper hand over Google in terms of AI.
