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The rise of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has taken the market by storm and posed a threat to Google’s core product – its search engine. Google has always been an AI-driven company, but the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has taken Google by surprise. ChatGPT became available in November 2022. In just a few months, it reached 100 million active users monthly – making it the fastest-growing app in history, beating the popularity of TikTok.
This led to Google’s management issuing a “code red” over the technology, and several teams at Google have been redirected to work on Google’s AI-driven tool – Bard.
What is Bard?
Earlier this week, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai announced the launch of Google’s rival to ChatGPT known as Bard, which he has described as “an experimental conversational AI service.” In other words, Bard is a new chatbot by Google powered by LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications). Bard combines the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of Google’s large language models.
What can you do with Bard?
Like ChatGPT, Bard allows users to ask questions to which it will reply with high-quality answers. Conversational AI tools like ChatGPT and Bard are a step up from conventional methods of searching the internet for answers about a topic. These tools quite literally make information available to you at your fingertips. These AI tools can be thought of as having a smart friend with you all the time. If you ever need to know about something, simply ask, and the AI model will reply with an answer that is accurate most of the time.
Unlike search engines, Conversational AI bots save you the time needed to type a question on the search engine, find which result is most accurate, and then sift through the information to get your answer.
Conversational AI Bots are not just for getting quick answers. They can also be used to run searches that would otherwise take too long for the user. For example, if you need to find out about a historical event but don’t want to spend hours searching through books or websites – then ChatGPT and Bard are there for you! Similarly, if you want more information about a topic with which you are unfamiliar – like how does an engine work? Or what makes up the structure of an atom? You can ask a conversational AI bot and get your answers in the form of a conversation with the bot. It doesn’t matter if you are a layman or an expert; conversational AI bots can answer all your queries.
How does it compare to ChatGPT?
While the proof of concept seems appealing, Bard has caused Google to lose over $100 Billion due to a mistake it made. When asked a question, Bard presented an inaccurate answer. Furthermore, analysts felt that Google didn’t reveal how well their AI Bot will stack up to Microsoft’s AI.
In the advertisement, Bard is given the prompt, “What new discoveries from the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) can I tell my nine-year-old about?” Bard responds with a number of answers, including one suggesting the JWST was used to take the very first pictures of a planet outside the Earth’s solar system or exoplanets. This is inaccurate, as the first pictures of exoplanets were taken by the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) in 2004, as confirmed by NASA.
Google’s response to this situation was that the situation highlights the importance of rigorous testing, which shall be conducted in the coming weeks. Users that are interested in using Bard were given the opportunity to sign up for early access to test the AI model.
Google’s recent efforts to enhance its search capabilities and respond to ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing AI have caused it to rush the announcement of Bard, which has led it to make an embarrassing mistake during the demo.
As to how well Bard will be compared to ChatGPT, only time will tell. It is clear that in its current state, it isn’t as good as ChatGPT. Still, knowing that Google has access to exabytes of data, it’s possible that with time, Bard will be quite advanced and may stand a chance against OpenAI’s ChatGPT. For now, even Microsoft’s Bing AI seemed more reliable with its answers.
How do I sign up for Bard?
Currently, Bard is open for beta testing. Users that are interested in testing out Bard may sign up at https://aitestkitchen.withgoogle.com/. Upon signing up, you will be asked a few simple questions and thereafter be added to a waiting list. You will be notified via email and given access to Bard if approved.
What does AI mean for search engines?
Microsft’s CEO Satya Nadella has said that the race is on to bring AI to search engines.
Microsoft is in the process of releasing its new intelligent search engine to accompany Edge’s AI-enhanced features. The two will provide users with an improved browsing experience for finding information online.
Unlike ChatGPT, which only has knowledge of events up until 2021, the “New Bing” can also retrieve news about recent events. In The Verge’s demos, users could ask questions about Bing’s launch and get answers from actual headlines published by news sites within the hour—even though they were asking a computer program rather than another person.
While AI-enhanced searches bring a lot of advanced and quite interesting features to search and the web browser itself, there are still a few major concerns regarding the inaccuracies of the information or answers they provide—these range from fake biographies about people to outright dangerous medical advice. Furthermore, tools like these can be “jailbroken,” which means tricking the AI chatbots into disregarding filters intended to prevent them from generating dangerous or hateful content.
This is still an issue that all companies in the tech space have been working to tackle and improve upon.
While all the advancements and conveniences sound great, there is still one major downside to all of them. AI-assisted searches could cause a major unbalance in the online space. Suppose AI tools like the new Bing are able to scrape information from the web without users clicking through to the source. In that case, it could remove a significant revenue stream for many websites. This is still something that Microsoft and Google need to address to keep things fair and help website owners continue to deliver high-quality content.
Takeaway: Google’s new AI assistant Bard wasn’t exactly what we’re all hoping for and expecting from a tech behemoth such as Google. Their AI Chatbot was quite a disappointment, especially due to the successful launches and experiences users have had with ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing. The solution to the problem is simple; Google needs to invest more time and effort into developing its AI. The current state of their bot is a far cry from the success OpenAI has had with ChatGPT.
Final Word
Lastly, Google’s rush to get Bard unveiled has resulted in a $100 Billion mistake which could have been avoided if they had spent more time polishing it up before launching. Whenever a company such as Google announces a new product, people expect something of high quality, and sadly Bard was just not quite there yet. That being said, the chatbot is in beta, which means it’s still being developed and improved by Google’s developers. It’s still unclear when Google will finish developing Bard and if they’ll ever be able to compete with OpenAI and Microsoft.
