Bard arrives to innovate and transform the user experience, but unfortunately, it’s not for everyone yet. Discover what’s stirring up the market abroad and hope that it soon becomes available in more countries!
Google is taking the first steps to open access to Bard, an innovative experiment that allows collaboration with generative artificial intelligence. For now, only the United States and the United Kingdom have access to this novelty, but plans for expansion to other countries and languages are already underway. So, if you’re eager to learn more about this novelty and how it can impact the way we work and communicate, keep reading!
On March 21st, Google began opening access to Bard. This launch follows the announcements from the previous week, as the company continues to bring useful AI experiences to people, businesses, and communities. For now, the company considers Bard as an “experiment” and not a replacement for traditional searches. Google admits that the system can still provide inaccurate information, which demonstrates the importance of improving this technology through user feedback.
About Bard: It Can Make Mistakes
Bard is powered by a large-scale language model (LLM), specifically an optimized and lightweight version of LaMDA, and will be updated with more advanced models over time. An LLM can be thought of as a prediction engine. Given a prompt, it generates a response by selecting, word by word, those that are likely to come next. Choosing the most likely option each time would not lead to very creative responses, so there is some built-in flexibility. The more people use them, the better LLMs become at predicting useful responses.
However, LLMs also have their flaws. For example, they learn from a broad spectrum of information that reflects real-world biases and stereotypes, which sometimes appear in their responses. Furthermore, they can provide inaccurate, misleading, or false information with confidence. As with other chatbots, prolonged interactions can lead to the emergence of “extreme personalities.” To deal with this, Google has opted to restrict the amount of consecutive interactions that can be had with Bard. After a certain period, the chatbot forgets the previous interaction and starts a new conversation.
When using Bard, you will usually have the option to choose between different response drafts, allowing you to select the best starting point. You can continue collaborating with Bard, asking follow-up questions and requesting alternatives if desired.
Google plans for Bard to function as a direct interface to a large-scale language model (LLM) and be complementary to the Google Search experience. The idea is that with Bard, users can easily check answers generated in Google Search or research information from various sources on the internet. By clicking on “Search with Google,” search suggestions will be displayed, and Search will open in a new tab, allowing you to find relevant results and explore the topic further.
Artificial intelligence has been a growing topic of interest in the technology world, and Google is gearing up to compete with OpenAI and its phenomenon, ChatGPT. Competitors like Microsoft are already integrating conversational experiences into their search engines (Bing). While having developed the technological basis for these language models, Google has been more cautious in implementing and making these tools publicly available.
Although Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, has denied that new-generation chatbots pose a threat to the search engine, the truth is that integrating these technologies has the potential to transform the way we interact with the internet and seek information. At the same time, Google faces challenges related to assessing the quality of responses generated by Bard and the possible impacts on user experience.
In this context, it is crucial to follow Google’s advancements in artificial intelligence and how the company plans to tackle the challenges and explore the opportunities brought by this technology. The coming weeks should bring more information about the plans of the Mountain View giant and its strategy to stay ahead of the competition in the field of conversational AI.