Google has finally decided to answer the challenge and threat posed by Microsoft-backed OpenAI and its AI chatbot- ChatGPT.

What is Bard, when can I access it?

• Google’s Bard is functioned on LaMDA, the firm’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications system, and has been in development for several years.
• It is what Sunder Pichai termed an “experimental conversational AI service”.
• Google will be opening it up to trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.
• It is not yet publicly available.

What is Bard based on?

• Bard is built on Transformer technology—which is also the backbone of ChatGPT and other AI bots.
• Transformer technology was pioneered by Google and made open-source in 2017.
• Transformer technology is a neural network architecture, which is capable of making predictions based on inputs and is primarily used in natural language processing and computer vision technology.
• Previously, a Google engineer claimed LaMDA was a ‘sentient’ being with consciousness.

How does it work?

• Bard draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.
• In short, it will give in-depth, conversational and essay-style answers just like ChatGPT does right now.
• It requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback.

What about its computing power?

• Remember running these models also requires significant computing power.
• For instance, ChatGPT is powered by Microsoft’s Azure Cloud services.
• This also explains why the service often runs into errors at times, because too many people are accessing it.

Key difference between ChatGPT and Google’s Bard

• It appears that to take on ChatGPT, Google has an ace up its sleeve: the ability to draw information from the Internet.
• Bard draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.
• ChatGPT has impressed with its ability to respond to complex queries — though with varying degrees of accuracy — but its biggest shortcoming perhaps is that it cannot access real-time information from the Internet.
• ChatGPT’s language model was trained on a vast dataset to generate text based on the input, and the dataset, at the moment, only includes information until 2021.

Is Bard better than ChatGPT?

• Bard looks like a limited rollout right now.
• Google is looking for a lot of feedback at the moment around Bard, so it is hard to say whether it can answer more questions than ChatGPT.
• Google has also not made clear the amount of knowledge that Bard possesses.
• For instance, with ChatGPT, we know its knowledge is limited to events till 2021.
• Of course, it is based on LaMDA, which has been in the news for a while now.

Why has Google announced Bard right now?

• Bard comes as Microsoft is preparing to announce an integration of ChatGPT into its Bing Search engine.
• Google might have invented the ‘Transformer’ technology, but it is now being seen as a latecomer to the AI revolution.
• ChatGPT in many ways is being called the end of Google Search, given that conversational AI can give long, essay style and sometimes elegant answers to a user’s queries.
• Of course, not all of these are correct, but then AI is capable of correcting itself as well and learning from mistakes.

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