The ChatGPT rival will draw from Google’s vast library of information, but it’s not ready for business just yet.
Google has opened a waiting list for Bard, its generative AI chatbot, the tech giant announced on Tuesday. Bard turns out to be a direct competitor of ChatGPT and GPT-4, the generative AI from startup OpenAI, which Microsoft uses in its Bing Chat.
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How to sign up for the Google Bard waitlist
To sign up for the Google Bard waitlist, go to bard.google.com and register with an existing Google account. Accounts managed by a Google Workspace administrator are not eligible. Bard runs in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, and Edgium.
Google Bard builds on years of research
Google Bard runs on Language Model for Dialogue Applications, Google’s own large language model. Google first announced it was internally testing its generative AI in January. Google Bard is based on work done in Google’s AI Test Kitchen, which launched in August 2022. Before that, the tech giant was working on a machine learning program for generating natural-sounding language from 2017.
Bard also hooks directly into Google Search. Most conversations have a suggested query added to them, which Google suggests users can do to “check the answer.” Interestingly, Google hasn’t made any announcements about integrating the natural language chat feature into general search so far.
Google Bard is only available in US English, with plans to expand it to other languages. In addition, Google plans to add the ability to write code to Bard, as well as “multimodal experiences,” including video and audio.
Google wants user feedback on Bard
“Bard is experimental and some answers may be inaccurate,” Google noted. The team at Google even poked fun at some of Bard’s suggestions own announcement post.
Google also emphasized privacy. For example, the version of Bard that becomes available through the waitlist cannot answer questions about what happened before in a conversation between himself and a human. According to the Frequently Asked Questions about Bard, Google purposely limited Bard’s “ability to hold context”. Google asks users to send feedback on Bard’s answers.
In an internal email viewed by CNBCSundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, told employees, “Things will go wrong. But user feedback is crucial to improving the product and the underlying technology.”
Google competes with Microsoft and OpenAI
Google Bard’s major competitor is OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Until now, ChatGPT has the advantage of being able to write basic code already, greatly extending the business applications.
Microsoft’s Bing search uses OpenAI’s GPT-4, the large multimodal model on which ChatGPT is built. ChatGPT is currently available with a subscription to OpenAI’s ChatGPT Plus.
Startup Anthropic, funded by Google, has its own AI assistant, Claude. Anthropic is playing in the search engine space with a partnership with DuckDuckGo while using it Google as a cloud provider.
What technology leaders should consider before adopting AI
Chat assistance made with large language model AI has received criticism for returning answers that are easy to parse but are factually incorrect. There are also some concerns about the job training AI requires outweighing the productivity benefits, or AI content replacing human-made work and thereby limiting the number of available jobs. Business leaders should consider whether generative AI is right for their work culture and whether it improves productivity.
