Google is preparing for a showdown in the realm of artificial intelligence with "Bard," a conversational service that appears to be aimed at challenging the dominance of Microsoft-backed ChatGPT.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced in a blog post on Monday that Bard, the company's new chatbot, will first be made available exclusively to a select group of "trusted testers" before its wider release later this year. Bard is designed to explain complex subjects, such as outer space discoveries, in simple terms that a child can understand, as well as perform other tasks such as providing tips for party planning or lunch ideas based on what's in the fridge.
Although Pichai did not mention whether Bard will be able to write in the style of William Shakespeare, after whom the chatbot is named, he did say that it "can be an outlet for creativity and a launchpad for curiosity." Google's announcement of Bard came just two weeks after Microsoft revealed its investment of billions of dollars in OpenAI, which develops ChatGPT and other tools that can write text and generate images.
Google is under pressure to demonstrate its ability to keep pace in this rapidly developing field of technology, and a team of Google engineers has reportedly been asked to prioritize a response to ChatGPT. Bard was initially developed as part of Google's "code red" effort under the name "Atlas," which aimed to counter ChatGPT's success in attracting millions of users while also raising concerns about its ability to write essays for students.
Pichai has emphasized the importance of artificial intelligence for several years, and Google plans to incorporate its latest advancements, such as the Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA), into its search engine to provide more helpful answers to users' questions. Additionally, Google recently announced its investment in and partnership with Anthropic, an AI startup focused on AI safety, which has built its own chatbot named Claude.