After several days of unfounded rumours, Google finally revealed Bard, its answer to ChatGPT. It is a platform based on LaMDA, its powerful natural language model.
Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, made the announcement of the new AI chatbot through a post on the company’s blog. Bard is based on Google’s own LaMDA language model, so it has nothing to do with OpenAI’s Large Language Model (LLM) used by ChatGPT.
Google started developing the Language Model for Dialogue Applications two years ago. Bard is the first “experimental AI service” based on this model. According to Pichai, Bard is initially using “a simplified model version of LaMDA” that requires less computing power and can therefore be used by more people.
For the time being, like Bing-ChatGPT, it should be open to “trusted testers”, but it will be made available to a “broader public” for testing “in the coming weeks”. Bard will reportedly be able to employ sophisticated search queries or tasks based on up-to-date information from the Internet, similar to Bing-ChatGPT.
Pichai claims that Bard will eventually be able to deliver a high-quality summary of the search results returned for a query from Google Search rather than compiling them in a rather simplistic way as it does now.