Google Announces ChatGPT Competitor Bard

Google will soon introduce a new conversational AI that can pull information directly from the internet. Although at first, it seems to be mainly an announcement to make it clear that there is more than ChatGPT.

 

Under the name Bard, Google wants to make its large language model LaMDA available to the general public. The company claims its model requires less computing power and is easier to scale to more users. However, the tool is not yet available for everyone, but for now, only for a limited number of external testers.

That is a direct competitor of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which has been all the rage recently. The chatbot can have conversations and write entire epistles on a topic. Although the accuracy is sometimes not what it should be, conversational AI is a breakthrough tool for the general public.

That probably set off alarm bells at Google. Especially after it became known that Microsoft, an investor in OpenAI, would offer ChatGPT in Azure and want to incorporate the tool into its search engine, Bing, that means that Google may lose ground in the domain where it has been dominant for more than twenty years.

Google emphasizes in its blog post that it already focused on AI six years ago and is considering various AI-driven functions in Google’s search engine.

An important difference with ChatGPT seems to be that Bard can get information from the current internet, whereas the other player only processes information until 2021. So, for example, ChatGPT does not know that there is a war in Ukraine.