Battle For AI Dominance: Google Unveils 'Bard' To Take On Microsoft-Backed ChatGPT

Google on Monday (6 February) unveiled its artificial intelligence enabled chatbot to rival Microsoft backed ChatGPT, a hugely popular conversational AI that mimics human writing.

Bard leverages Google's own Language Model for Dialogue Applications (or LaMDA).

Initially, Bard will be powered with a smaller model version of LaMDA. Google has released it to a select group of users for testing, and will be assessing the model's safety and quality of responses.

Bard will be available for "trusted testers" but will be widely available to the public in the coming weeks, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in a statement.

"Two years ago we unveiled next-generation language and conversation capabilities powered by our Language Model for Dialogue Applications (or LaMDA for short)," Pichai said.

"We’ve been working on an experimental conversational AI service, powered by LaMDA, that we’re calling Bard. And today, we’re taking another step forward by opening it up to trusted testers ahead of making it more widely available to the public in the coming weeks," he added.

Pichai said that Bard seeks to "combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models".

This suggest that Bard may be able to answer questions about recent events - something ChatGPT struggles with.

Pichai said that Google will start onboarding individual developers, creators and enterprises from next month so they can try the company's Generative Language API, initially powered by LaMDA with a range of models to follow.

"Over time, we intend to create a suite of tools and APIs that will make it easy for others to build more innovative applications with AI," he said.

Google's move comes as ChatGPT, created by San Francisco company OpenAI, has become hugely popular due to its ability to write essays, poems or programming code on demand within seconds, sparking widespread fears of cheating or of entire professions becoming obsolete.

Earlier last month, Microsoft had announced that it was backing OpenAI through a new “multiyear, multibillion dollar investment".

Further, the Satya Nadella-led tech giant has reportedly begun to integrate ChatGPT features into its Teams platform and is expected to adapt the app to its Office suite and Bing search engine.