Google on Tuesday invited people in the US and the UK to test its artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, known as Bard, as it continues on its gradual path to catch up with Microsoft Corp-backed ChatGPT.
Bard, ChatGPT and other similar AI apps can produce essays, poems or computing code on command and have taken the world by storm as the biggest new thing in tech since the advent of the iPhone.
Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google parent Alphabet Inc, told staff that after testing Bard with 80,000 Google employees, the chatbot would be tested with the public in the US and Britain as a “first step” before releases in more countries and languages other than English.
Photo: REUTERS
“As more people start to use Bard and test its capabilities, they’ll surprise us,” Pichai said in a memo to staff.
“Things will go wrong. But the user feedback is critical to improving the product and the underlying technology,” said Pichai, who had faced some criticism within the company for rushing to catch up with Microsoft.
In the launch, people wishing to play with Bard can sign up on a waiting list at bard.google.com, which is distinctly separate from the tech giant’s search engine.
“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,” Google vice presidents Sissie Hsiao and Eli Collins said in a blog post.
As exciting as chatbots can be, they have their faults, Hsiao and Collins said.
Google has so far proceeded more carefully in its rollout of generative AI to consumers, in contrast to Microsoft’s choice to swiftly make the products available despite reports of problems.
ChatGPT’s OpenAI is backed by Microsoft, which earlier this year said it would finance the research company to the tune of billions of US dollars.
Asked how its product was different from ChatGPT, Bard said that unlike its Microsoft-backed rival it was “able to access and process information from the real world through Google Search and keep my response consistent with search results.”
The bot also said that it was still “under development, while ChatGPT has been released to the public. This means that I am constantly learning and improving, while ChatGPT is likely to remain relatively unchanged.”
OpenAI recently released a long-awaited update of its AI technology that it said would be safer and more accurate than its predecessor.
Much of the new model’s firepower, known as GPT-4, is now available to the general public via ChatGPT Plus, OpenAI’s paid subscription plan and on an AI-powered version of Microsoft’s Bing search engine.
Microsoft has said that its quick adoption of generative AI has led to increased usage of its Bing search engine in the past few weeks, but it is still a clear underdog to Google, which captures about 85 percent of the global search engine market.
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