Google Launches Bard, a Challenge to Rival ChatGPT

ODSC - Open Data Science
3 min readFeb 8, 2023

Google has recently launched Bard, a new AI service that promises to revolutionize conversational AI, and could rival the wildly popular ChatGPT from OpenAI. According to Google, Bard is powered by LaMDA. It promises to provide a wealth of information by drawing information from the world wide web and providing robust responses to users. Google & Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote in a blog post about BARD, “Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models.”

Providing an example of the company’s goal with Bard, Pichai went on to write, “Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity, helping you to explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills.” As of right now, Bard is only available to a group of select testers with the goal of rolling out the chatbot to a wider audience in the coming weeks.

The purpose of this is for quality testing purposes according to Pichai, “We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information.” Of course, everyone still remembers Microsoft’s Tay chatbot, which went downhill in less than 24 hours of working with humans. This is likely why Google wants to test its chatbot in a controlled environment first.

To ensure all testing goes according to the tech giant’s plan, tests are “a demographically and geographically diverse group of people external to Google.” Compared to ChatGPT, this seems like a slower rollout, but considering that Google has around 20 AI-powered projects in the pipeline, a careful approach makes sense for a company this heavily invested in AI.

Clearly, Bard is Google’s attempt to come out with their own chatbot that can rival the popular ChatGPT. Right now, OpenAI’s chatbot hit a whopping 100 million users after two months of release, an impressive number and one that is demonstrating that greater popular engagement with AI isn’t only possible, but quite likely in the near future. Finally, Google has innovation in mind for developers as well when it comes to the future of AI.

In the same blog, Sundar Pichai wrote, “we’ll start onboarding individual developers, creators, and enterprises so they can try our Generative Language API, initially powered by LaMDA with a range of models to follow. Over time, we intend to create a suite of tools and APIs that will make it easy for others to build more innovative applications with AI.“. For developers who can’t wait to get their hands on the AI-powered suite of tools, this is a welcomed announcement.

Overall, the thread of heavy investment into AI doesn’t seem to be slowing down, and even might grow depending on AI’s integration into public & private spaces.

Originally posted on OpenDataScience.com

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