Google to launch ChatGPT competitor 'Bard': Sundar Pichai

New York: Google CEO Sundar Pichai has announced that the tech giant will soon launch an Artificial Intelligence (AI) powered chatbot called ‘Bard’, aimed at countering the popularity of the ChatGPT tool backed by Microsoft.

According to a blog post by Pichai, the conversational AI service will be assessed by a group of “trusted testers" before being rolled out to the public in the coming weeks.

“Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity," Pichai, the Indian-origin CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, said on Monday, adding that Google's chatbot will be able to explain complex subjects like new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a nine-year-old Google's announcement follows wide speculation that Microsoft is about to bring the AI chatbot ChatGPT to its search engine Bing, following a multi-billion dollar investment in the firm behind it, OpenAI, the BBC reported.

ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer), which was launched in November 2022, is capable of generating speeches, songs, marketing copy, news articles and student essays or human-like text based on the input it is given.

Bard, built on Google's existing large language model LaMDA, "seeks to combine the breadth of the world's knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models", Pichai, 50, said in the blog.

AI chatbots are designed to answer questions and find information.

"Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world's knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models," Pichai said in the blog post.

Pichai said he wanted Google's AI services to be "bold with innovation and responsible in our approach". However, he did not elaborate on how Bard would be prevented from sharing harmful or abusive content.

He said that Google will initially release Bard with a “lightweight model” version of LaMDA which will require less computing power and enable the tech giant to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback.

“We’re excited for this phase of testing,” Pichai said, adding that Google will combine external feedback with internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information.

“It’s critical that we bring experiences rooted in these models to the world in a bold and responsible way. That’s why we’re committed to developing AI responsibly,” he wrote in the blog.

Pichai also said on Monday that AI-powered tools will soon begin rolling out on Google’s flagship Search tool.

“Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distil complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web,” Pichai wrote, “whether that’s seeking out additional perspectives, like blogs from people who play both piano and guitar, or going deeper on a related topic, like steps to get started as a beginner.”