A little over a month after issuing an internal "code red" over ChatGPT's threat to its business, Google has unveiled its version of the AI chatbot. Dubbed Bard, the new tool is only available to a small group of testers at this time, but Google intends to release it broadly within weeks.
"We’ve been working on an experimental conversational AI service that we’re calling Bard," says Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet. "And today, we’re taking another step forward by opening it up to trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks."
While the feature announcement does not directly reference ChatGPT, it's clear that's what Google has in mind. The company makes a point to say Google has been focusing on AI for years—long before ChatGPT launched in November 2022 and quickly became one of the fastest-growing apps of all time.
"We have a long history of using AI to improve Search for billions of people," Pichai says. "We re-oriented the company around AI six years ago—and why we see it as the most important way we can deliver on our mission: to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful."
Bard runs on a lightweight version of LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), an AI engine Google announced two years ago. The company will need to scale it up to accommodate its millions of public users.
Another major item on the pre-launch checklist: ensuring accuracy of its answers. "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," Pichai says.
The search giant notes it was one of the first companies to publish a set of AI principles in 2018. One principle—"Avoid creating or reinforcing unfair bias"—recalls ChatGPT's latest controversy surrounding biased answers based on whether the user asks it to write a poem about President Trump, which it refuses to do, or President Biden, who it will gladly spin up a few lines about.
Once Bard launches, we can expect Google's homepage to have a new look. The company's web designers are working on a conversational, chat-based search function similar to ChatGPT, CNBC reports. The ability to ask more human-like questions, and receive richer answers, aims to better serve the way people are using Google these days.
"Increasingly, people are turning to Google for deeper insights and understanding," Pichai says. "AI can be helpful in these moments, synthesizing insights for questions where there’s no one right answer. Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web."
Without knowing the background on Google's response to ChatGPT, these sentiments seem like broad improvements the company could have made at any time. However, the push to use AI in a conversational interface, rather than simply improving Google's existing search result format, makes it clear Bard is a ChatGPT competitor.
In an effort to set itself apart, Google says it has also invited external software developers to use its Generative Language API to build their own tools. "Over time, we intend to create a suite of tools and APIs that will make it easy for others to build more innovative applications with AI."
The news comes ahead of a Tuesday press event Microsoft is hosting at its Redmond headquarters, where it's expected to discuss its version of ChatGPT. We got a brief glimpse over the weekend, when people on the Bing search engine spotted an "Ask me anything..." chat box. PCMag will be there tomorrow, so stay tuned for the details.