Google has just announced that it is opening up access to its new AI chatbot tool, Bard, which directly competes with ChatGPT. From Tuesday, users can join a waitlist to gain access to Bard’s features, which include outlining and writing essay drafts, planning events like baby showers, and generating meal ideas based on the contents of their fridge.
In addition to this, Google has also revealed plans to “thoughtfully” add large language models to search “in a deeper way” at a later time, and will start rolling out the tool in the United States and United Kingdom before expanding it to other countries and languages in the future.
However, this move comes as tech companies like Google, Microsoft, and Facebook compete to develop and deploy AI-powered tools, following the recent viral success of ChatGPT. Google also announced that it will be bringing AI to its productivity tools, including Gmail, Sheets, and Docs.
But the launch of Bard has not been without controversy, as a demo last month provided an inaccurate response to a question about a telescope. This caused Alphabet, Google’s parent company, to experience a 7.7% drop in share prices, wiping $100 billion off its market value.
Despite this, Google plans to continue using human feedback to improve its systems and add new “guardrails” to keep interactions helpful and on-topic. Meanwhile, OpenAI has just released GPT-4, the next-generation version of the technology that powers ChatGPT and Microsoft’s new Bing browser, with similar safeguards.
