All About the Google Bard AI Chatbot

The arrival of Google Bard has brought conversational AI to a wider audience. After two months of limited testing, Google has removed the waitlist for access to its AI-powered chatbot. This announcement was made during the Google I/O developer conference. Similarly, Microsoft recently eliminated the waitlist for its competing chatbot on Bing to show its cards to the competition finals. Google has expanded Bard’s availability to people in 180 English-speaking countries and territories. 

And as part of its language expansion plan, it has introduced Japanese and Korean chat abilities to support 40 languages. With the increasing abilities of LLMs, more and more businesses are trying to amalgamate them into their operations to make the workings more efficient and self-sufficient.

This revolution in computing enables chatbots to provide a wealth of information through a natural interface which is another lucrative prospect for enterprises. They have demonstrated capabilities in diverse areas, including poetry writing, philosophy discussions, software development, exam preparation, and tax advice. 

If they continue to grow at the current rate, there is a huge potential for them in different industries and spheres where they can replace a substantial amount of inefficient workforce. In this article, we will discuss Bard in great detail and cover all its necessary aspects to help you understand if it is the next big thing for Google or has already fallen behind OpenAI in AI development.

What is Google Bard?

Bard, developed by Google, is a generative AI and falls under large language models (LLMs). It is focused on creating text-based content and answering questions naturally and conversationally. Bard is powered by Google’s Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), released in 2021. Google has been working on LLMs since 2017 when it made its Transformer deep learning model available to the public. Bard results from years of development and builds upon the foundation laid by Google’s previous language models.

Bard’s development is a top priority for Google, as evidenced by the company restructuring its Assistant team and allocating more AI specialists to work on Bard. Since its debut, Google has consistently added features and improvements to Bard, indicating its long-term commitment to the chatbot. While Bard may have similarities to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Since its debut, ChatGPT has had unique features and capabilities, such as integrating up-to-date information and handling voice prompts.

With ongoing development and a dedicated team behind it, Bard is poised to continue evolving and expanding its capabilities in the future. With the advent of ChatGPT, Google was facing a serious threat to its position as a mammoth in the tech world, where it controlled a huge portion of data that got transferred over the internet. Still, with ChatGPT, the way people access information changed substantially, and with Bard, Google is trying to fix the loss caused by its lethargic position on LLMs and their development in the past.

How does Google Bard work?

Google Bard aims to complement the Knowledge Graph Cards in search results by answering NORA (No One Right Answer) questions. While Knowledge Graph Cards offer concise information, Bard is designed to understand and respond to nuanced questions by leveraging the LaMDA language models. LaMDA enables Bard to grasp the context and colloquialisms in dialogue-based datasets, enhancing its understanding of queries. 

To generate its responses, Bard utilizes information from across the web and employs the conversational capabilities of LaMDA to deliver answers that resemble those of a human conversation. Google intends for Bard and other AI chatbots to provide high-quality responses, facilitating user understanding and decision-making processes.

During demonstrations, Bard has been shown to assist users in decision-making scenarios, such as choosing a car, and can engage in follow-up discussions to delve deeper into specific topics. This functionality could reduce the need for users to click on search results. However, Google remains committed to supporting content creators and maintaining a healthy, open web ecosystem, ensuring valuable traffic is directed to various sources. 

Bard exists as a standalone utility rather than integrated directly into Google Search. Users can engage in a chat session with the AI, and the context of previous questions within a session is remembered, allowing for more refined and contextualized responses. Bard also can correct itself if it provides inaccurate information, showcasing a commitment to accuracy and quality.

What are some Ethical implications of its launch?

AI chatbots like Bard, ChatGPT-4, and others may indeed provide quick answers that are only sometimes correct. These platforms can be influenced by biases in training data, conflicting or outdated information, and even generate made-up facts in some cases, as highlighted by CNET’s Wordsmith. As an experienced company in information retrieval, Google has mechanisms to sort fact from fiction and prioritize accurate information. 

Google’s Featured Snippets, for example, employ machine learning models to collect data from various online sources, quantify sentiment and other variables, and filter out answers that fall outside a midrange. This process helps provide responses considered safe opinions or accurate information based on the available data. 

The biggest ethical challenge, apart from the ones that can be easily solved, is how much we need to develop these models. The current rate of development has spooked many experts who believe there need to be some regulations to monitor it and ensure that it doesn’t lead to something catastrophic for us in the future. 

Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, a prominent AI researcher and former Google employee, recently resigned and expressed concerns about the rapid advancement of generative AI models. He believes that the pace of development may make it challenging to regulate these technologies and could be exploited by malicious actors. While Google maintains a commitment to responsible AI development, Hinton suggests that the industry’s push to win over users, exemplified by the rise of ChatGPT, has compelled the company to accelerate the development of Bard.

Over a thousand industry leaders, including Tesla CEO Elon Musk, have called for a six-month moratorium on developing AI models, expressing concerns about their risks to society and humanity. These leaders argue that companies like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI are racing to create increasingly powerful AI systems that may become difficult to understand, predict, or control. 

In an interview, Google CEO Sundar Pichai acknowledged that an aspect of AI development remains a “black box” and is not fully understood. The concerns raised by Dr. Geoffrey Hinton and the open letter from industry leaders highlight the need for responsible development and regulation of AI models to ensure their benefits are harnessed while mitigating potential risks to society.