Google officially announced that a competitor to OpenAI's popular ChatGPT language model is in development. It is currently considered to be in an experimental stage and is called “Bard”.
Bard is a dialog-optimized language model, just like ChatGPT. However, Bard was trained with datasets provided by Google and supported by LaMDA, Google's language model for dialog applications.
Bard "seeks to combine the breadth of knowledge of the world with the power, intelligence and creativity of our great language models," according to Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai.
According to Pichai, the chat AI service "mines information from the web to provide high-quality responses." The public version of ChatGPT does not have these possibilities, as its data set is limited to data from 2021 and earlier. New versions of ChatGPT are already available without any time limit.
Microsoft started recently to test one of these improved ChatGPT apps on the Bing search engine. It's currently available to a small subset of Bing users, and turns the Bing search engine into a interface that looks like application ppi chats enable Bing users to communicate directly with the language model.
Bard, according to Google, can be an “outlet for creativity”. Google users can use Bard to “explain new discoveries from NASA” or find “best strikers in soccer” and more.
Bard ships with a light model version of LaMDA, which is optimized to require less computing power. Google is initially making Bard available to a small set of users and plans to work on feedback from their first impressions. The company wants to make sure that AI responses will "correspond with a high level of quality, and security to real-world information."
Bard, like ChatGPT, comes with a disclaimer stating that “Bard may provide inaccurate or inappropriate information”.
Microsoft seems to have the lead right now in language model integration. ChatGPT is available and a more advanced version is already being tested on Bing. Google Bard won't be publicly available for some time, and it remains to be seen whether its initial rollout was rushed by Google to counter Microsoft's advance.
However, it's good to know that early search integration or coexistence in Bing and Google Search can produce inaccurate results.
