ChatGPT: Google releases access to the Bard chatbot in the US – 03/21/2023 – Tech

For more than three months, Google executives watched as projects by Microsoft and a San Francisco company called OpenAI fired the public’s imagination with the potential of artificial intelligence.

But this Tuesday (21), Google started to leave behind its position as a spectator, by launching a chatbot called Bard. The new artificial intelligence chatbot will be available to a limited number of users in the United States and United Kingdom, and will expand to more users, countries and languages ​​over time, Google executives said in an interview.

The cautious launch is the company’s first public effort to take advantage of the recent chatbot craze driven by OpenAI and Microsoft, and is intended to demonstrate that Google is capable of offering similar technology. But the company is taking a much more cautious approach than its competitors, who have faced criticism for putting unpredictable and sometimes unreliable technology into circulation.

Still, the launch represents a significant step in warding off a threat to Google’s most profitable business, its search engine. Many in the tech industry believe that Google — more than any other major tech company — has a lot to lose, and gain, from artificial intelligence, which could help many of Google’s products become more useful, but also it could help other companies gain ground in the huge Internet search business that the company dominates.

A chatbot can instantly produce full-sentence responses that don’t force people to scroll through a list of results — unlike a search engine.

Google launched Bard as a separate webpage rather than a component of its search service, starting a tricky dance to embrace the new artificial intelligence while preserving one of the tech industry’s most lucrative businesses.

“It’s important that Google starts playing in this space, because this is where the world is headed,” said Adrian Aoun, former director of special projects at Google. But the shift to chatbots could help topple a business model that relies on advertising, said Aoun, now chief executive of startup Forward, which operates in the healthcare business.

At the end of November, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, an online chatbot that can answer questions, write articles, and rant about almost any topic. Two months later, the company’s main investor and partner, Microsoft, added a chatbot similar to Bing, its Internet search service, demonstrating how this technology could change a market that Google has dominated for more than 20 years.

Google has been racing since December to get artificial intelligence products up and running. The company declared a “red alert” in response to the launch of ChatGPT, making artificial intelligence its top priority. And it spurred teams within the company, including researchers specializing in AI safety studies, to collaborate to accelerate the approval of a wave of new products.

Last week, OpenAI tried to double down on its bet by releasing a newer technology called GPT-4, which will allow other companies to include the kind of artificial intelligence that powers ChatGPT in a variety of products, including enterprise software and e-commerce sites.

Google has been testing the technology that underlies Bard since 2015, but until now it has not released it except for a small group of experimental users, because, as with the chatbots offered by OpenAI and Microsoft, it does not always generate reliable information. and may show negative biases against women and people of color.

“We’re very aware of the issues; we need to take this to market responsibly,” said Eli Collins, Google’s vice president of research. “At the same time, we see all the excitement in the industry and the excitement from all the people that are using generative artificial intelligence.”

Collins and Sissie Hsiao, Google’s vice president of product, said in an interview that the company had yet to determine a way to make money from Bard.

Google announced last week that artificial intelligence would be put to use in its productivity apps, such as Docs and Sheets, which companies pay to use. The underlying technology will also be for sale to companies and software developers looking to build their own chatbots or power new applications.

“We are still in the early days of this technology,” Hsiao said. “We are exploring how these experiences can manifest themselves in different products.”

The recent announcements are the start of Google’s plan to introduce more than 20 artificial intelligence products and features, The New York Times reported, including a feature called Shopping Try-on and the ability to create custom background images for YouTube videos. and Pixel phones.

Rather than being combined with the company’s search service, Bard is a standalone web page with a question box. At the end of each response, a “Google it” button appears that takes users to a new tab with a page of conventional Google search results on the subject.

Google executives introduced Bard as a creative tool designed to compose emails and poems and offer guidance on how to engage children in new hobbies such as fishing. The company is interested to see how people will use the technology, and will further refine the chatbot based on usage and feedback, executives said. Unlike its search service, however, Bard was not primarily designed to be a reliable source of information.

“We think of Bard as a complement to Google Search,” Hsiao said. “We want to be bold in how we innovate with this technology, but we also want to be responsible.”

Translated by Paulo Migliacci