Google has made its long-awaited AI chatbot, called Bard, available to the public in the US and UK; an attempt to regain its leadership in the most competitive and high-profile new technology in years.
The bot, which is based on tech that has been under development by the company for eight years, can answer questions, write text and have informative conversations on nearly any subject. But in a sign that Google is proceeding more cautiously than its rivals — something that has spurred internal tension among the company’s own employees — Bard will have a separate website and won’t immediately be prominently promoted through Google Search or the company’s other popular products.
Bard is similar to ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Bing, but it’s based on Google’s own language model rather than OpenAI’s.
“Bard is really here to help people boost their productivity, accelerate their ideas, and just fuel their curiosity,” said Sissie Hsiao, a vice president at Google and one of the executives working on Bard.
In a blog post, Google said it would eventually make the bot available in other countries, but gave no specific timeframe.
The company is months behind some competitors in rolling out the first version of its chatbot to the public, critical time that competitors have used to tweak their products. OpenAI, a start-up that developed ChatGPT, has allowed users to test its version since November and last week released its most cutting-edge technology, GPT-4. Microsoft rolled out a similar tool in its Bing search engine in February.
But OpenAI and Microsoft’s AI chatbots, which are based on the same technology, have also made mistakes and exhibited bizarre behaviour, like Microsoft’s Bing identifying itself as “Sydney” and getting into hostile arguments with people asking it questions. That’s exposed the companies to criticism that the technology isn’t ready for widespread use. Google has tested its AI on employees for years — which one engineer at the time claimed had become sentient — but has erred on the side of caution with the public.
Still, Google’s slower pace has sparked frustration among some employees, who say the company has dropped the ball on generative artificial intelligence, the broad term for technology that uses powerful algorithms trained on huge portions of the internet to produce original content, from eerily humanlike text to vivid artwork.
Some blame Google’s slow start on concerns that the technology could hurt the company’s reputation if it’s released before it’s fully ready for public consumption, according to people familiar with internal discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share information that has not been made public. Other AI leaders, like Meta’s chief artificial intelligence scientist Yann LeCun, have said tools released by the bigger tech companies have appeared to be less interesting and capable than ones released by smaller start-ups because they have more guardrails to prevent offensive or harmful outcomes.
Google has made its long-awaited AI chatbot, called Bard, available to the public in the US and UK; an attempt to regain its leadership in the most competitive and high-profile new technology in years.
The bot, which is based on tech that has been under development by the company for eight years, can answer questions, write text and have informative conversations on nearly any subject. But in a sign that Google is proceeding more cautiously than its rivals — something that has spurred internal tension among the company’s own employees — Bard will have a separate website and won’t immediately be prominently promoted through Google Search or the company’s other popular products.
Bard is similar to ChatGPT or Microsoft’s Bing, but it’s based on Google’s own language model rather than OpenAI’s.
“Bard is really here to help people boost their productivity, accelerate their ideas, and just fuel their curiosity,” said Sissie Hsiao, a vice president at Google and one of the executives working on Bard.
In a blog post, Google said it would eventually make the bot available in other countries, but gave no specific timeframe.
The company is months behind some competitors in rolling out the first version of its chatbot to the public, critical time that competitors have used to tweak their products. OpenAI, a start-up that developed ChatGPT, has allowed users to test its version since November and last week released its most cutting-edge technology, GPT-4. Microsoft rolled out a similar tool in its Bing search engine in February.
But OpenAI and Microsoft’s AI chatbots, which are based on the same technology, have also made mistakes and exhibited bizarre behaviour, like Microsoft’s Bing identifying itself as “Sydney” and getting into hostile arguments with people asking it questions. That’s exposed the companies to criticism that the technology isn’t ready for widespread use. Google has tested its AI on employees for years — which one engineer at the time claimed had become sentient — but has erred on the side of caution with the public.
Still, Google’s slower pace has sparked frustration among some employees, who say the company has dropped the ball on generative artificial intelligence, the broad term for technology that uses powerful algorithms trained on huge portions of the internet to produce original content, from eerily humanlike text to vivid artwork.
Some blame Google’s slow start on concerns that the technology could hurt the company’s reputation if it’s released before it’s fully ready for public consumption, according to people familiar with internal discussions who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share information that has not been made public. Other AI leaders, like Meta’s chief artificial intelligence scientist Yann LeCun, have said tools released by the bigger tech companies have appeared to be less interesting and capable than ones released by smaller start-ups because they have more guardrails to prevent offensive or harmful outcomes.