The war of artificial intelligence: Google challenges Chatgpt with its AI Bard program

Tech giant Google has announced the launch of a new program called Bard that uses artificial intelligence (AI) technology. The launch comes amidst the growing popularity of ChatGPT – an AI chatbot model that interacts conversationally. Currently available in beta, Bard will be more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.

As Google CEO Sundar Pichai explained, Bard is powered by Language Model for Dialogue Applications (or LaMDA), a family of conversational neural language models developed by Google two years ago. As an artificial intelligence tool, Bard aims to improve our lives by creating new ways to approach information and turn it into useful knowledge more efficiently.

Sundar Pichai stated:

“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our great language models. It taps into the information on the web to provide fresh, quality answers.”

Last week, Google offered its employees the chance to test the service by asking questions and receiving detailed answers similar to ChatGPT. During the tests, the chatbot responded fairly quickly, providing answers to various questions. Most notably, they asked a question about whether there would be another round of layoffs at Google, as the company cut its workforce by 6%. The chatbot responded that it was unlikely.

The answer was:

“Layoffs are typically done to cut costs and structure, but the company is doing well financially. In fact, Google’s revenue is up 34% in 2021, and the company’s stock price is up 70% since January 2022.”

Apparently, Bard, launched by Google, is a response to ChatGPT, an AI chatbot launched by OpenAI in November 2022. Although the service is relatively new, everyone seems to be obsessed with it because of the unique features it offers. The bot remembers the thread of your dialogue, using previous questions and answers to inform its next responses. It draws its answers from huge volumes of information on the internet.

Google’s progress in AI

Google’s fist showed its interest in artificial intelligence back in 2017, when a separate division called Google AI was created to explore the technology. The company sees the future in AI, has already begun integrating the technology into its existing services and reportedly intends to work on as many as 20 new AI products of its own.

A Google representative commented:

“We believe AI is a foundational and transformative technology that is incredibly useful for individuals, businesses, and communities, and as our AI principles emphasize, we need to consider the broader societal impacts these innovations can have. We continue to test our AI technology internally to ensure it is useful and safe, and we look forward to sharing more experiences externally soon.”

Recently, Google reportedly invested $300 million in AI company Anthropic. The latter explained that the partnership would allow companies to co-develop AI computing systems, with the startup leveraging resources “cutting-edge” from Google.