ALBAWABA — Google on Tuesday announced a limited public rollout of its ChatGPT competitor Bard, inviting people in the United States and the United Kingdom to test its artificial intelligence chatbot.
Users in the U.S. and the U.K. join a waiting list at bard.google.com website, distinctly separate from the tech giant's search engine.
The company plans to add other countries and languages down the line.
Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, Bard is a chatbot based on a large language model based on Google’s own Language Model for Dialogue Applications, with the company using a lightweight and optimized version of LaMDA to run its chatbot.
Sundar Pichai, Google chief executive officer, tweeted that the move is an "early experiment" allowing people to collaborate with generative AI, drawing responses from what Google considers "high-quality" information sources in order to display up-to-date answers.
“You can use Bard to boost your productivity, accelerate your ideas and fuel your curiosity. You might ask Bard to give you tips to reach your goal of reading more books this year, explain quantum physics in simple terms or spark your creativity by outlining a blog post,” Sissie Hsiao, Google vice president of product and Eli Collins, Google VP of research wrote in a blog post.
"We've learned a lot so far by testing Bard, and the next critical step in improving it is to get feedback from more people. We continue to see that the more people use them, the better LLMs (large language models) get at predicting what responses might be helpful," they added.
Google has adopted a more cautious rollout of generative AI in contrast to Microsoft which integrated AI swiftly into its product line despite reports of problems.
As exciting as chatbots are, Hsiao and Collins warned that they have their faults, which include incorporating real-world biases and stereotypes or inaccuracies in responses.
Acknowledging that Bard is not yet perfect, Google for its part, is initially limiting the length of its chatbot’s conversations for safety reasons but will increase those limits over time.
Google did not disclose the limits on Bard with this release but included a prominent warning at the bottom of the chat window saying: "Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information that doesn't represent Google's views."
