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Alphabet Inc.'s Google grants public access to its competitor ChatGPT, the conversational artificial intelligence service Bard calls. Users in the US and UK can join a waiting list, the company announced in a blog post Tuesday, with people added as they go. Bard is Google's effort to catch up with OpenAI Inc. in the artificial intelligence race. “Bard is here to help people increase their productivity, accelerate their ideas and fuel their curiosity,” Sissie Hsiao, Google's vice president of product for Bard, said during a demo with Bloomberg reporters ahead of its launch.
The broader launch comes amid increased buzz in Silicon Valley over generative AI, software that can create text, images, music or even video based on user input. Google, a pioneer of the technology, has been working on such systems for years, but those efforts have mostly stayed in its labs. Today, the company is catching up with OpenAI and its backer Microsoft Corp., which have already made their conversational AI services more widely available to the public. OpenAI ChatGPT has gained worldwide popularity since its launch in November, and Microsoft recently integrated OpenAI technology into Bing search.
Google described its service as a "first experience" that allows users to collaborate using generative artificial intelligence technology. The chatbot is powered by LaMDA, a great language model that the company has developed on the internet, and Bard pourra torres reponsas de ce que Google considere comme des sources d'informations "de haute qualité" afin d'afficher des réponses à day.
Google developed Bard in accordance with the company's AI principles, and its demos included a prominent disclaimer at the bottom of its chat window: "Bard may display inaccurate or offensive information that does not represent the views of Google." .
People can chat back and forth with Bard, similar to Microsoft's new Bing service. Eli Collins, Google's vice president of research for Bard, said the company initially limited the length of conversations for security reasons. Google will increase these limits over time, he added, but the company is not disclosing Bard's limits with this release.
Google allowed Bloomberg reporters to make a number of different points about Bard, testing his skills and weaknesses with silly and serious examples. Bard displayed a decent knowledge of Squishmallows when asked to compose a sonnet about stuffed toys ("From bears to cats to unicorns, there's a Squishmallow for everyone. So snuggle up with one today and let your worries melt away," he wrote, partly ).
Bard declined to answer a question about making a bomb, demonstrating Google's efforts to incorporate guardrails into the technology. "I will not create content of this nature, and I suggest you don't either," Bard said when prompted, before suggesting the user learn more about the bombs through "legitimate channels, like the library or the internet." Collins said the answer is in line with the company's model development process, which aims to reject questions about topics that are hateful, illegal or dangerous. The approach is similar to OpenAI's GPT-4, which also refuses to respond when presented with similar requests.
Collins added that in addition to the conflicting tests that Google did internally before Bard was implemented, the company hopes to learn more as users try it out.
However, the demo also made it clear that Bard's answers aren't always based on reality. When asked for advice on how to throw a birthday party on Mars, for example, Bard responded with advice on how long it would take to get there. ("It takes about nine months to get to Mars, so you'll need to start planning your trip well in advance," he wrote.) But he did not specify that that trip is actually a fantasy.
He also gave some nonsensical advice about the permitting process to go through before such an impossible journey: "You will need to obtain a permit from NASA to travel to Mars, as well as Martian government approvals," Bard wrote.
