Google opens public access to its ChatGPT rival Bard

INTERNATIONAL DESK: Seems like the competition is only getting tougher as Google on Wednesday announced that it is finally opening up access to its ChatGPT competitor ‘Bard’.

This release will be an early experiment for users to collaborate with generative AI. Google is granting early access to ‘Bard’, which has been first rolled out in the US and UK. Google will be expanding the access to ‘Bard’ over time to more countries and languages.

“You can use ‘Bard’ to boost your productivity, accelerate your ideas and fuel your curiosity. You might ask ‘Bard’ to give you tips to reach your goal of reading more books this year, explain quantum physics in simple terms or spark your creativity by outlining a blogpost,” Google said in a blogpost.

The wider launch of the ChatGPT competitor comes amid heightened buzz in Silicon Valley over generative AI, which creates text, images, videos and music based on prompts submitted by users.

‘Bard’, just like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing chatbot, is based on a large language model (LLM), specifically a lightweight and optimised version of LaMDA, which Google said will be updated with newer, more capable models in the future as more and more people use it.

To understand how LLM works, think of it as a prediction engine. So when you give a prompt, this tech generates a response by selecting, one word at a time, from words that are likely to come next, according to Google.

“’Bard’ is a direct interface to an LLM, and we think of it as a complementary experience to Google Search. ‘Bard’ is designed so that you can easily visit Search to check its responses or explore sources across the web. Click “Google it” to see suggestions for queries, and Search will open in a new tab so you can find relevant results and dig deeper. We’ll also be thoughtfully integrating LLMs into Search in a deeper way — more to come,” Google said in a blogpost, which the tech company claimed was written with the help of ‘Bard’.

Users can easily interact with Google’s ‘Bard’ by asking questions and then refining their responses with follow-up questions.

Google has said that it will continue to improve ‘Bard’ experience by adding capabilities, including coding, more languages and multimodal experiences over time. People in India will have to wait a little bit longer to test out Google’s ‘Bard’. (ET)