Google unveils Bard, its rival to ChatGPT

Google has unveiled a new chatbot tool named “Bard” in response to the recent success of ChatGPT, released by AI research company OpenAI.

Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google and parent company Alphabet, said in a blog post that Bard will be opened to “trusted testers” starting from Monday, with plans to make it available to the public “in the coming weeks”.

Like ChatGPT, Bard is built on a large language model and trained on vast amounts of data from the internet to generate appropriate responses to user prompts.

“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models,” Pichai wrote.

We’re excited for this phase of testing to help us continue to learn and improve Bard’s quality and speed.

“We’ll combine external feedback with our own internal testing to make sure Bard’s responses meet a high bar for quality, safety, and groundedness in real-world information,” Picahi continued.

“We’re excited for this phase of testing to help us continue to learn and improve Bard’s quality and speed.”

The move comes as Google’s core product, online search, is thought to be facing its biggest risk in years due to the popularity of ChatGPT.

ChatGPT has been used to generate stories, essays, song lyrics, and answers questions that were previously searched for on Google.

Microsoft, who confirmed in January that it will be making a “multibillion dollar” investment in OpenAI, has announced that it will incorporate ChatGPT into some of its products and rumors suggest it may also be integrated into the Bing search engine.