Google wants to declare war on ChatGPT with Bard

In the battle for supremacy in the field of generative artificial intelligence, Google has entered its ChatGPT competitor Bard. Although the chatbot is still in an early development phase, users from the US and Great Britain have been able to register for the beta test since Tuesday. “It’s an early experiment that allows users to collaborate with generative AI,” Google executives Sissie Hsiao (vice president of product) and Eli Collins (vice president of research) wrote in a blog post.

The search engine giant has been in a leading position in AI research for years, but has not dared to open the systems to external access until now. Now Google should feel compelled to go on the offensive with Bard. This is probably mainly due to the permanent media presence of the Californian start-up OpenAI, whose chatbot ChatGPT has always been good for headlines – positive and negative – for months. ChatGPT exists in its fourth version, meanwhile OpenAI has secured billions of investments from Microsoft.

Google sees Bard as a “complement” to the search engine. The chatbot is a direct interface to a large language model, write Hsiao and Collins. Bard is designed so that you can easily invoke the search to check the answers or explore sources on the Internet. If you click on “Google it” you can see suggestions for search queries. Search opens in a new tab so you can find relevant results and dig deeper. Bard runs on a stripped down and optimized version of the LaMDA language model and is scheduled to be updated with newer, more powerful models over time.

Who is to be trusted here?

Bard currently only provides information in English, but in the future functions such as coding will be added in addition to other languages. “With your feedback, Bard will keep getting better and better,” the Google executives say optimistically. “Bard may provide inaccurate or inappropriate responses,” it said.

And it almost seems as if Bard has gone out of his way to back up that warning with an example. A user asked the chatbot with an ironic undertone how long it would be before Google Bard was switched off again. Bard’s response: “Google Bard has already been shut down.” As a reason and source for this misinformation, Bard gave a user comment meant as a joke on the social news website “Hacker News”. At least Google can console itself: The Microsoft search engine Bing AI, which uses ChatGPT as AI, came to the same wrong conclusion.