Highlights:

  • According to reports, Bard is faster than the competing chatbot in Microsoft Corporation’s Bing search engine.
  • Last month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai detailed that Bard will initially be powered by a lightweight version of Bard that is optimized for hardware performance.

Google LLC recently announced that its Bard artificial intelligence chatbot would be available to users in the United States and the United Kingdom.

Users can sign up for a waitlist to access Bard on a new webpage created by the search giant. According to The Verge, Google anticipates expanding the service to a wider audience to be “slow.” The company has yet to specify when Bard will be available to the general public.

After launch, Bard allows users to ask a limited number of questions per chat session, but there is no limit on the number of chat sessions initiated. The service generates up to three distinct draft responses to a query. Bard displays a “Google it” button beneath the drafts that launches Google’s search engine in a new tab.

According to reports, Bard is faster than the competing chatbot in Microsoft Corporation’s Bing search engine. It is believed that the faster response times are because Bard currently has fewer users. In addition, implementing the underlying large language model may influence the chatbot’s performance.

In response to a request for the biographies of a famous media house personnel, Bard replied, “I do not have enough information about that person to help with your request,” despite the abundance of information on Google itself. In contrast to ChatGPT, it did not provide several incorrect facts about a person.

Google introduced LaMDA, a large language model, for the first time in 2021. Last month, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said that Bard will initially be powered by a lightweight version of Bard that is optimized for hardware performance. Pichai explained that the version’s reduced hardware requirements would make it easier for Google to make it widely available. In a recent blog post, Google’s Vice Presidents, Sissie Hsiao and Eli Collins, explained that Bard will be updated with “newer, more capable models over time.”

Google intends to enhance Bard in additional ways. The search giant plans to equip the chatbot with additional language support, the capacity to generate software code, and unspecified multimodal capabilities. A multimodal AI model is a neural network capable of processing text, images, and videos.

Hsiao and Collins wrote recently, “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 blog post. We’ve learned a lot so far by testing Bard, and the next critical step in improving it is to get feedback from more people.”

In conjunction with the launch of Bard, Google is integrating large language models into other product components.

The company announced last week that its Workspace productivity suite would soon include various new generative AI features. The capabilities will aid users in composing emails, analyzing data in spreadsheets, and developing presentations.

Google is also incorporating generative AI into its cloud platform. Vertex AI, the company’s suite of cloud services for constructing and deploying neural networks, will provide access to several large language models. The models are being released with the Generative AI App Builder, a new tool that will make it easier for customers to develop machine learning applications.