Unless you spent the last few months in a cave you must heard about ChatGPT. No matter who you are, you cannot miss the tool that knows how to answer almost any question. One answer was waiting to be answered – what will Google do? Microsoft’s announcement that they are investing in OpenAI, along with their wish and desire to include it in Microsoft Office and Bing Search Engine, changed the balance of power against the company that dominates the search – Google. We knew that Google were working on their own tool, and the world was waiting to see how it would react, and here it did.

This is Bard – an experimental service for a conversational artificial intelligence model (Conversational AI) powered by LaMDA, Google’s language model for dialog applications. In a press release issued by Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, he announced that the company is taking another step forward and allowing trusted testers to try it out, before it becomes available to the public in the coming weeks.

Pichai wrote that “Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses. Bard can be an outlet for creativity, and a launchpad for curiosity, helping you to explain new discoveries from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a 9-year-old, or learn more about the best strikers in football right now, and then get drills to build your skills”. He added that “We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback. We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety and groundedness in real-world information. We’re excited for this phase of testing to help us continue to learn and improve Bard’s quality and speed.”
1/ In 2021, we shared next-gen language + conversation capabilities powered by our Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA). Coming soon: Bard, a new experimental conversational #GoogleAI service powered by LaMDA. https://t.co/cYo6iYdmQ1
— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) February 6, 2023
Pichai also explained in his statement how Brad can help developers to innovate with AI: “Beyond our own products, we think it’s important to make it easy, safe and scalable for others to benefit from these advances by building on top of our best models. Next month, we’ll start onboarding individual developers, creators and enterprises so they can try our Generative Language API, initially powered by LaMDA with a range of models to follow. Over time, we intend to create a suite of tools and APIs that will make it easy for others to build more innovative applications with AI. Having the necessary compute power to build reliable and trustworthy AI systems is also crucial to startups, and we are excited to help scale these efforts through our Google Cloud partnerships with Cohere, C3.ai and Anthropic, which was just announced last week. Stay tuned for more developer details soon.”

One important statement that Google CEO Pichai made was that “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: In 2018, Google was one of the first companies to publish a set of AI Principles. We continue to provide education and resources for our researchers, partner with governments and external organizations to develop standards and best practices, and work with communities and experts to make AI safe and useful. Whether it’s applying AI to radically transform our own products or making these powerful tools available to others, we’ll continue to be bold with innovation and responsible in our approach. And it’s just the beginning — more to come in all of these areas in the weeks and months ahead.”
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