American multinational technology company Google has rolled out its AI-powered chatbot “Bard”, which is only available to limited users.
The company revealed that Bard is an experiment and may likely give inaccurate or inappropriate responses to users. To access the feature, Google has directed users in the U.S and U.K to its website to enable them join the waitlist and try it out. Users are mandated to drop feedback to help make Bard better.
The chatbot will be accessible via its web page, separate from Google’s regular search interface. It will offer three answers to each query, a design choice meant to impress users that Bard is generating answers on the fly and may sometimes make mistakes.
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Speaking on the roll out of Bard, Google VP of Product Sissie Hsiao and Google VP of Research Eli Collins wrote in a blog post,
“Today we’re starting to open access to Bard, an early experiment that lets you collaborate with generative AI. This follows our announcements from last week as we continue to bring helpful AI experiences to people, businesses and communities.
“You can use Bard to boost your productivity, accelerate your ideas and fuel your curiosity. You might ask Bard to give you tips to reach your goal of reading more books this year, explain quantum physics in simple terms or spark your creativity by outlining a blog post. We’ve learned a lot so far by testing Bard, and the next critical step in improving it is to get feedback from more people.”
Asked whether competitive dynamics were behind Bard’s rollout, Jack Krawczyk, a senior product director, said Google was focused on users. Internal and external testers have turned to Bard for “boosting their productivity, accelerating their ideas, really fueling their curiosity,” he said.
Google AI-chatbot Bard is powered by a research large language model (LLM), specifically a lightweight and optimized version of LaMDA, and will be updated with newer, more capable models over time. Bard, like OpenAI chatbot ChatGPT, will respond to questions about and discuss an almost inexhaustible range of subjects, showing humanlike understanding to users’ questions. In a conference in Paris, Google had explained that Bard would work particularly well for “NORA” queries questions to which there’s no one right answer.
Recall that in February this year, shares for Google’s parent company, Alphabet, dropped 9% after the AI chatbot, Bard, gave an incorrect answer. Google’s reportedly lost $100 billion in market value after its new artificial intelligence technology produced a factual error in its first demo.
Ever since the error of its chatbot, in a bid to redeem its reputation, Google has been working tirelessly to enhance Bard to ensure it operates at its maximum capacity, to ensure that the chatbot doesn’t repeat the same costly mistake like that of last month. The tech giant revealed that it knows the limitations of the technology, and so it wants to be very deliberate at the pace at which it will be rolled out.
Google also added that it will be closely monitoring Bard to make sure it adheres to its own “AI principles” which include avoiding the creation or reinforcement of bias. Bard will not be able to express opinions or take on a persona, although like ChatGPT it will be able to mimic the writing styles of others.