Google Launches Alternative To ChatGPT Named ‘Bard’

Google is now officially stepping on the gas. The US search engine giant is working on a competitor for the Microsoft-supported AI chatbot ChatGPT under the name “Bard”. The tool is now available for a few “trustworthy testers”.

As Google boss Sundar Pichai announced in a blog entry today, the company is working on its own alternative to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Dubbed “Bard,” the tool is described by Pichai as an “experimental, conversational AI service” that can answer users’ questions and conduct conversations.

After a cautious start with limited availability for trusted testers, Google plans to roll out Bard to a wider audience within the next few weeks, Pichai said. It is still unclear what capabilities Google Bard should have, but the first screenshot shows how users are asked to ask the bot questions about practical tasks.

Google Bard is supposed to offer practical help

Among other things, Google apparently imagines that the bot will help the user to plan things like a baptism or create a recipe from a list of ingredients. According to the Google boss, Bard gets most of his information from the internet, so he uses Google’s search indexes to deliver up-to-date, high-quality answers.

Bard can be an “outlet for creativity, a launching pad for curiosity” who, for example, can help explain new discoveries by NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope to a nine-year-old, learn more about baseball’s best batsmen, or develop training routines of the user’s skills, Pichai continues.

Despite Bard’s apparently somewhat hasty introduction, Google wants to continue to proceed cautiously when it comes to the introduction of AI features and tools. The service is based on the AI ​​model LaMDA, which has so far only been available to a very limited extent via a special AI test kitchen app. One of the reasons for Google’s reluctance is probably the tendency of AI-powered chatbots to provide toxic content in response at some point along the way.

In line with this, Google CEO Pichai also stated that they want to use a combination of external and internal tests to collect feedback to ensure that Bard offers a safe user experience where the information is of high quality and information-driven based on the real world.