With all the hype over ChatGPT, it seemed like Alphabet was getting nervous, so voilà! Google Bard was rolled out. But not exactly. It seems like Alphabet wanted the world to know that they too were working on (or already had) their own miraculous artificial intelligence chatbot service—Google Bard, similar to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Google Bard is described by its site as both an “experiment” and “collaborator.”
Unlike ChatGPT, Bard is an AI chat service that pulls info directly from the web. Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA) is the conversational AI model language (developed by Google in 2021) powering Bard; its site explains, “the language model learns by ‘reading’ trillions of words that help it pick up on patterns that make up human language so it’s good at predicting what might be reasonable responses.” If you want to experiment with Google Bard now, you can sign up for the waitlist.
So what’s the point you might ask? Our guess is that Alphabet wants their global consumer base to know that ChatGPT isn’t alone. In an official statement, Sundar Pichai (the CEO of Google and Alphabet) suggested, “Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity.” Just as Google came for email, advertising, video/entertainment (buying YouTube), apps, cell phones/hardware, cloud, you name it; the company is also plotting to dominate conversational AI technologies. Their move into the generative AI space would not be sudden; its been at least six years in the making—Google Bard is just their latest iteration. Learn about their AI Test Kitchen here.