Google has started rolling out the AI Bard chatbot, but it is only available to certain users and they must be over 18 years old. Unlike its viral rival ChatGPT, it can access updates from the Internet and has a “Google it” button to access search.
It also checks its source name for facts, such as Wikipedia.
But Google warned that Bard would have “limitations” and said it could share misinformation and display falsehoods.
Chatbot AI is programmed to answer online questions in natural human language. They can write anything from speeches and marketing texts to computer code and student essays.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, said that when ChatGPT launched in November 2022, it had more than a million users within a week.
Microsoft has invested billions of dollars in it, integrating it into its Bing search engine last month.
It also revealed plans to include several versions of the technology in its office applications, including Word, Excel and Powerpoint.
Google has been the slower, more cautious runner in the race for innovative AI with its version, Bard, set to launch in the US and UK. Users will need to sign up to try it out.
Bard is a descendant of an older Google language model called Lamda, which was never fully released to the public. However, it attracted a lot of attention when one of the engineers working on it claimed that its answer was so convincing that he thought it was sensitive. Google denied the allegations and he was fired.
Google senior product manager Jack Krawczyk told the BBC that Bard was “an experiment” and that he hoped people would use it as “a launch pad for creativity”. He showed me an example of how he used Bard to help plan his little one’s birthday party.
He devised a theme that combined his child’s interest in bunnies and gymnastics, found the address of a place he mentioned, and suggested board games and food.
“A lot of [media] reports that AI is the hero,” says Krawczyk. “I think humans are heroes, and great language patterns are there to help unleash creativity.”
While ChatGPT’s knowledge base only runs until 2021 – it can’t answer questions about recent earthquakes in Turkey and Syria, for example – Bard can access the information. Present. This explains to me a report on the UK government’s ban on TikTok on phones, posted on the BBC’s website a few days ago. It is programmed not to respond to offensive prompts and has filters to prevent it from sharing harmful, illegal, pornographic or personal identification. .
Don’t get me wrong, this is an extremely conservative product launch, a far cry from the old “move fast and smash things” bravery in the early days of big tech.