Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai has revealed his company’s alternative to the revolutionary artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot ChatGPT—Bard.
Key Details
- Alphabet and Google have scrambled in the past few months to prepare their alternative to Microsoft and OpenAI’s ChatGPT AI chatbot.
- The company was put on the back foot by the success of Microsoft’s $10 billion investment in OpenAI, which threatens to turn Bing into the most cutting-edge search engine on the market.
- The Financial Times reports that the company has invested $300 million into a 10% stake in Anthropic, an AI research and safety company with its own AI model called Claude.
- In a Monday blog post, the company finally revealed Bard—a propriety chatbot being tested that will be integrated into Google’s search engine.
Why It’s Important
As we mentioned yesterday, Google has rushed to catch up with Microsoft and OpenAI, only revealing its rival chatbot technology yesterday, two months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. The reveal is good news for Alphabet, which has seen a 3.1% valuation bump on the stock market in the past 24 hours.
Fearful that it would lose its competitive advantage as the most popular search engine, Google has spent the last several weeks diverting resources internally from its other AI projects like LamBDA to producing a rival—going as far as to bring in company founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page to oversee the process.
How It Works
Bard is an experimental conversation service built from a lightweight version of Google’s LamBDA AI. This allows the AI to operate with less computing power. It is currently available for Google’s trusted testers. It will become available to the general public in the next few weeks. The company is seeking feedback and testing Bard’s ability to provide high-quality and real-world related responses.
Bard is only just the beginning of Google’s vision for AI implementation. Using its other AI projects like LaMDA, PaLM, Imagen, and MusicLM, the company foresees the integration of these models into all of its products, starting with its search engine. Google sees AI as a means of distilling complex information into easily accessible and digestible bites of user information.
Notable Quote
“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 nine year old or learn more about the best strikers in football right now and then get drills to build your skills,” says Google CEO Sundar Pichai.
