Alphabet Inc.’s Google is getting ready to launch its ChatGPT competitor.
On Monday, the company announced that trusted testers will be allowed access to its new conversational AI service, Bard and that it would be ready for general release “in the coming weeks.” The service aims to generate detailed answers in response to simple questions like what to eat for lunch or how to plan a friend’s baby shower.
Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced the development in a blog post, saying, “We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to ensure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety, and groundedness in real-world knowledge.” “We’re excited for this testing phase to help us continue to learn and enhance Bard’s quality and speed,” the statement reads.
LaMDA, a large language model developed by Google, will power Bard. This model caused controversy in May when a Google software engineer declared publicly that the AI was “sentient,” a remark that has since come under investigation. A Google spokeswoman said the testers it chose for early access are a geographically varied set of outsiders who will help it develop and comprehend how typical users will experience the AI service in practice.
Pichai has made an effort to highlight the company’s advancements in artificial intelligence in the face of increased competition from companies like OpenAI Inc., the creator of the wildly successful chatbot ChatGPT.
Google will make its language models available to developers so they can use them to build their own applications in addition to the Bard release. Next month, according to Pichai, the company will start making its Generative Language API available to businesses, developers, and creators.
In the blog post, Pichai stated that “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.”
In a last week’s results call, Pichai made a point of highlighting the company’s recent release of its massive language models. Users will soon be able to utilize language models “as a companion to search,” the speaker continued.
The artificial intelligence startup Anthropic, which is creating its own chatbot to compete with ChatGPT, and Google last week announced a partnership. A person with knowledge of the situation claims that Google has also contributed close to $400 million to the business. Despite not being required to do so, the agreement grants Google a stake in Anthropic, according to a previous article by CoinDisc.
