American tech giant Google is rushing to join the newfound craze for conversational AI, fueled by rival OpenAI’s ChatGPT’s widespread popularity.
According to TechCrunch, an American tech-related online newspaper, Bard, the company’s new AI experiment, aims to “combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models.” The model, or service, or AI chatbot, however you wish to describe it, was announced in a blog post by CEO Sundar Pichai.
He specifically mentioned Google’s recent focus on AI, as well as the fact that the most impactful concept (the Transformer) was produced by the company’s researchers in 2017.
“It’s a really exciting time to be working on these technologies as we translate deep research and breakthroughs into products that truly help people,” Pichai wrote.
While reading this, it’s difficult not to wonder how Google managed to be so decisively outpaced by OpenAI, the latter of which is now synonymous with the technologies pioneered by the former, reported TechCrunch.
The short explanation is that whereas Google produced paper after paper trying to figure out how to incorporate AI into its existing business strategy, OpenAI focused on producing the best models and letting users work out their own applications.
Bard shows Google taking a page from that playbook, releasing a “lightweight” version of the model for testing purposes.
As per TechCrunch, the model uses Google’s own LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) to power a conversational AI that can also draw on information from the web.