Google launches the Bard robot, the rival of ChatGPT – 06/02/2023 – Tech

Google announced on Monday (6) the launch of a text generator robot to compete with ChatGPT, Bard. The tool debuts on the market after the OpenAI chatbot conquered 100 million users in less than two months and dominated discussions on social networks.

“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our great language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality answers,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai, on the company blog.

Google’s artificial intelligence (AI)-based chatbot is not yet publicly available. Big tech says the technology is under testing and should be open to the public in the coming weeks.

Bard will ship with a lighter version of LaMDA, the language model for dialog applications. The AI-based feature is also expected to integrate with Google’s search engine.

LaMDA was the subject of controversy last year. Google’s then senior AI software engineer, Blake Lemoine, claimed that the group’s chatbot would be “self-aware”. He was fired from the company in July last year.

Google and many leading scientists were quick to characterize Lemoine’s opinion as misguided, claiming that LaMDA is just a complex algorithm designed to generate convincing human language.

“We will combine external feedback with our own internal testing to ensure that Bard’s responses meet a high level of quality, security and grounding in real-world information,” Pichai said in Monday’s post (6).

Google says it follows 10 principles in developing artificial intelligence applications, including avoiding reinforcing bias, promoting safety testing and public understanding.

In the ad, Google exemplifies Bard’s use by asking him which discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope would be interesting to tell a nine-year-old.

He responds with three examples. That in 2023, the telescope discovered a series of galaxies with the nickname “peas”. That the object captured images of systems more than 13 billion years old. And that recorded the first images of a planet outside the solar system.

Other dialogue options, briefly displayed in a GIF of the post, also show that the Bard can plan a friend’s baby shower, compare two Oscar-nominated films and come up with recipe ideas based on the items available in the user’s fridge.

Last week, Google announced partnerships with artificial intelligence startups C3.ai and Anthropic. The first developed AI-based features available on Google Cloud. The second was formed by former OpenAI employees who are developing their own chatbot, named Claude.

Google launched its first tool with transformer technology —the same one used in ChatGPT— at the end of 2019: the search algorithm Bert (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) was trained to understand context and go beyond the keywords that feed the engine. search.

The current version of the AI-based search engine is called MUM and is a thousand times more powerful than Bert.

Google’s announcement comes after Microsoft said in January it would make a multi-year multibillion investment in OpenAI, the company that created the chatbot.

ChatGPT works and has gained fans around the world. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI said that, in five days of operation, the robot got one million users.

Microsoft has been betting on OpenAI for nearly four years, when it earmarked $1 billion for the startup co-founded by Elon Musk and investor Sam Altman.