What is Bard AI? Google’s Big Rival to ChatGPT

Google just announced a new AI conversation language model called “Bard”

Earlier today, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet and Google, released a message under the company news section of the Google blog site. In it, Pichai announced Bard AI, something he defines as an “experimental conversational AI service”. The CEO stated that Google sees it as its mission to

“organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet. | REUTERS/Brandon Wade/File Photo
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet. | REUTERS/Brandon Wade/File Photo

But what is Bard AI, really?

The blog mentions how Google is largely seen as a source for answering simple close-ended questions like, “How many countries are there?”, but that their desire is to improve their ability to answer open-ended, or even opinionated, questions, like, “How can I travel to every country easily?”. This is exactly the task that Bard sets out to achieve.

Its capabilities include next-generation language and natural conversational composition, as well as language translation and mathematical calculation. The public will have to wait until Google releases Bard AI in the coming weeks. Meanwhile, select testers will be granted access to Bard A.I. today for moderation and debugging.

How does Bard AI Work?

Bard uses a less computing-intensive scaled version of the Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA). Using this transformer within their API, Google seeks to combine the knowledge base of the internet with the creativity and convenience of their language models.

Picah also stated Google’s current use of AI in their products as well as how its presence is going to increase in their search engine in the coming years. Soon, instead of having to comb through countless blogs and Reddit posts to find and formulate the answer you are specifically looking for, you’ll simply have an answer generated by AI and conveniently displayed in a text prompt. Microsoft has stated something similar regarding their intentions for Google’s rival search engine, Bing.

Google Photo released with the BardAI announcment.
Google Photo released with the Bard AI announcement.

Once Google does implement its AI services onto its search engine, the large amount of usage will directly correlate to tons of user feedback, moderation, debugging, and overall exponential improvements.

Picah even mentioned in his Google Post how Moore’s Law, the law that says technology will increase at an exponential rate as access to technology will progress the production of new technology, is currently being outpaced as the length of the script generated by AI language transformer models is doubling biannually.

Concerns about Bard & ChatGPT.

Some are concerned about the impact on education. Many see ChatGPT and Bard as a means to cheat on your homework or expedite your essay with little backing, sources, or fact-checking. While this may be somewhat true regarding its impact going forward, especially as its accessibility increases, similar arguments were made regarding social media, search, engines, the internet, and even the written language itself. Even Socrates himself insisted that written language was not an efficient form of conveying knowledge,

“They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.” – Plato’s Phaedrus

Wise words, yet More’s Law has been proven time and time again as technology increases and the human mind expands, or rather adapts.

However, one of the largest concerns revolving around chat-based AI is its tendency to spread misinformation and even respond with inappropriate comments or hate speech. So, how long will it be until AI is at the top of our favorite search engines?

Here are my predictions for Bard.

Google is a data collection company. Therefore, bard will most likely be based on pulling data from the internet and responding to it in a creative way. Whereas OpenAI is an artificial intelligence company. They have spent years using human trainers to encourage their language models to respond with verbose, fluid, (for lack of a better term) chat-like responses. In summary, I predict Bard AI will be great for asking closed-ended questions or short open-ended questions, while ChatGPT will do better at answering longer open-ended questions. This said, Google is a massive company with the resources to quickly catch up to its non-profit competitor, OpenAI.

OpenAI’s advantage will be prevalent in the short run. Since Google covers over 84% of the global search market, once Google begins implementing Bard and AI into their search engine, the feedback they will receive will increase the technology’s capabilities exponentially. This was the same intention OpenAI had when they decided to release ChatGPT and GPT3.5 to the public. Only for Google, it’s on a much larger scale.

As previously stated, AI is improving exponentially as scripts double every six months. However, even though the scripts are increasing, that does not mean that the accuracy is improving, or at least is improving enough to put Google’s massive, data-wielding reputation on the line.

Matchup: Bard vs. ChatGPT | Which is better?

In the coming weeks, I will be reviewing Chat GPT and, upon its release, Bard, of course! Watch out for an update as I will be posting the comparisons here.

Sources

https://blog.google/technology/ai/bard-google-ai-search-updates/

https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt/

https://www.statista.com/statistics/216573/worldwide-market-share-of-search-engines/#:~:text=As%20of%20December%202022%2C%20online,share%20of%20around%2084.08%20percent.

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