Google opens early access to Bard, its AI chatbot
Google opens early access to Bard, its AI chatbot
Google recently disclosed that Bard, a rival to ChatGPT, will be made available. But since the company is starting with a limited public release, likely, you won't be able to access the product straight away.
Visitors from the U.S. and the U.K. can visit
bard.google.com to sign up for a waitlist. Bard is an "early experiment
that allows you to collaborate with generative AI," according to the startup.
Bard is a chatbot built using a broad language model,
similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT and Microsoft's Bing chatbot. Bard will respond to
your questions, and you can ask further questions to clarify his responses.
"Bard can help you be more productive, develop ideas
more quickly, and satisfy your curiosity. Sissie Hsiao, VP of Product at
Google, and Eli Collins, VP of Research at Google, stated in a blog post,
"You might ask Bard to give you ideas to meet your goal of reading more
books this year, explain quantum physics in simple terms, or inspire your
creativity by writing a blog post.
There wasn't much to see when Google originally introduced
Bard last month other than a lengthy blog post by Google CEO Sundar
Pichai. A lightweight and improved version of Google's LaMDA (Language Model
for Dialogue Applications), which is the basis for the model used in Bard.
Google explained that Bard would do particularly well on
"NORA" queries—questions with "no one right answer"—at a
conference in Paris. Naturally, there are concerns about conversational AI's
accuracy, knowledge sources, and ethical workarounds.
Google included a couple screenshots of its chatbot product
in its blog post. The first thing users see is a blank chatbox with the
disclaimer, "Bard may display erroneous or inflammatory information that
doesn't represent Google's views," directly underneath it.
Although there are a few example prompts, users are free to
enter any information in the text area. The solution is then loaded by Bard and
displayed all at once. Although Bard isn't writing a word-for-word
response, Google claims that it functions quite similarly to other generative
AI chatbots. Using the words before it, it generates the next word.
You can give the response a thumbs up or down, start a new
discussion, or click the "Google It" button to go to Google's search
page at the bottom of the response.
Bard doesn't contain footnotes with links to web sources as
Microsoft's Bing chatbot does. You can verify the veracity of the response
using those footnotes. If Bard's response doesn't satisfy you, Google also
allows you to browse several reactions to the same question. To load additional
responses, click the "See other drafts" link in the top right corner.
Bard now exists independently of Google's search engine.
From the search results, it appears that you cannot communicate with Bard. Yet
Bard will undoubtedly spark some discussions about plagiarism and the
connection between Google and outside websites. As Google already tries to
provide immediate answers on Google.com without requiring users to visit
another website, this isn't a brand-new problem.
In other words, Bard's limited release today is just the
beginning of a protracted process. When the product is more generally
accessible, it will be interesting to see how users interact with it as well as
how regulators and content producers react to Google's new offering.