After founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin were brought back into the business to help deal with the threatening emergence of ChatGPT, Google’s LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications)-based chatbot rival, Bard, which “draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses” goes into beta for selected users from Monday 13 February.
ChatGPT uses artificial intelligence technology called a large language model, trained on vast swaths of data on the internet. That type of model uses an AI mechanism called a transformer that Google pioneered. ChatGPT’s success in everything from writing software, passing exams, and offering advice, in the style of the King James Bible, on removing a sandwich from a VCR has propelled it into the tech spotlight, even though its results can be misleading or wrong.
Other large language models used by language-specific systems like ChatGPT, which are particularly good at generating text, include PaLM and systems from AI21 Labs, Adept AI and Cohere.
Google says it has no current commercial plants for Bard – it seems like an instrument to drive AI adoption and assist content creators and news publishers to begin with. Incidentally, Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google subsidiary Deepmind, has told Time they’re considering a 2023 private beta test of an AI chatbot called Sparrow.
Microsoft has responded with what appear to be plans to integrate a GPT-4 powered ChatGPT with its Bing search engine.
Source: CNET