Search engine giant, Google has launched a beta version of its artificial intelligence powered chatbot called “Bard” to rival viral ChatGPT.
Written using Google’s own language model, Lamda, the search engine giant said Bard will be used by a group of tester before being launched to the public in coming weeks.
“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models,” wrote Google boss Sundar Pichai in a blog.
Mr Pichai stressed that he wanted Google’s AI services to be “bold and responsible” but did not elaborate on how Bard would be prevented from sharing harmful or abusive content.
Bard will initially operate on a “lightweight” version of Lamda, requiring less power so that more people can use it at once, he said.
Google’s launch of Bard is coming as Microsoft is about to bring the AI chatbot ChatGPT to its search engine Bing, following a multi-billion dollar investment in the firm behind it, OpenAI.
ChatGPT can answer questions and carry out requests in text form, based on information from the internet as it was in 2021. It can generate speeches, songs, marketing copy, news articles and student essays.
It is currently free for people to use, although it costs the firm a few pennies each time somebody does. OpenAI recently announced a subscription tier to complement free access.
Google’s bard hopes to do more and lead in this new AI battle for supremacy amongst big tech giants.
