Is called Bard. Just like the bard poet and storyteller of the Middle Ages. He was born in’generative artificial intelligence with which Google intends to respond to ChatGpt.
Sundar PichaiCEO of Alphabet, the company that governs Google, officially announced it with a post, after the article by Cnbc which in recent days had published several indiscretions on the plans of the Mountain View company in the field of artificial intelligence.
Contrary to what many hoped, Bard will not be open to the public for now. Pichai wrote that Google’s AI will be accessible to a select group of trusted testers. But all the others have hope: “Bard – writes the CEO – will be more widely available to the public in the coming weeks”. From this point of view, in short, Google intends to continue on its conservative path.
During a meeting that took place last January, both Sundar Pichai and Jeff Dean, the head of Google’s artificial intelligence divisionhad kept the impatience of some employees at bay, convinced that the company should respond as soon as possible to ChatGpt and to the company that developed it, Open AI, founded in 2015 in San Francisco. Just eight years ago.
“Aren’t we missing an opportunity?” an employee asked. Pichai and Dean had explained, on that occasion, that Google would have to wait longer than the others. Because if something went wrong, he would pay a higher price. “People trust the answers they get from Google,” said Jeff Dean, implying that any errors – related to a possible disinformationor violent or prejudiced language – would have seriously undermined the company’s reputation.
However, only a few days ago, commenting on the financial results of Alphabet, Pichai returned to the theme, accelerating: “Very soon people will be able to interact directly with our most recent and powerful linguistic model – said the CEO – to complete their research but also in experimental and innovative ways”.
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“With Bard, we try to combine the breadth of world knowledge with the intelligence, power and creativity of our great linguistic models – writes Pichai today, announcing the awaited AI -. Bard uses information on the web to provide high-quality, up-to-date answers. It can be a tool for creativity and a springboard for curiosity: for example, helping to explain the new discoveries of the space telescope to a 9-year-old boy or girl James Webb of NASAor to find out more about the best soccer forwards right now, or to get advice on how to improve your skills.
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“Initially – adds Pichai -. Bard will use a simplified version of LaMDA. This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, allowing us to open it up to more people and get more feedback. We will combine external suggestions with our own internal testing to ensure that Bard’s responses meet a high level of quality, security, and robustness of real-world information. This testing phase, which we are excited about, will allow us to continue to learn and improve the quality and speed of Bard.”
LaMDA – “Language Model for Dialogue Applications” – is the artificial intelligence model developed by Google to allow a machine to converse in a ‘natural’ way with a human being. Google has been working on it for many years. Yet the potential of LaMDA was only revealed in May 2021, when Sundar Pichai conversed with Pluto. Yes, the very planet, whose answers were obviously generated by the AI.
This ‘game’, thanks to the advances in generative artificial intelligence, today it is widespread. It can be done with ChatGpt, which you just have to ask “Act as…” (“Pretend you are…”) to start a conversation with a person, an animal or even an object. And it can be done, in an even more entertaining way, with sites such as Character.ai, which offer their communities the opportunity to converse with famous characters from the present and from the past, from Elon Musk to Queen Elizabeth II or Freud. In each of these cases, the answers obtained are always plausible and consistent. The new AIs, trained on an enormous volume of data, are in fact capable of imitating – in some cases perfectly – the style and expressions of writers, politicians, entrepreneurs and singers.
Announcing Bard, Google is preparing to revolutionize – or at least rethink – the way people search on the web. In short, the heart of Alphabet’s business, which risks slowing down due to the fault of its competitors. In particular of Microsoftwhich plans to revitalize its search engine, Bingusing ChatGpt’s AI to generate responses that are more natural and conversational, and that lend themselves to a potentially infinite dialogue with the user.
“Google Search is often thought to be used to get quick, factual answers, like “how many keys does a piano have?” – underlines Pichai in the post with which he announced Bard -. But more and more people are turning to us to find insights and advice, for example by writing “is it easier to learn to play the piano or the guitar and how much should I practice for each?”. Understanding from a sentence of this type what really is the type of information you are looking for is not easy”.
“Artificial intelligence can be useful in these moments, because it synthesizes a series of ideas where a question does not correspond to a single right answer – adds Pichai -. Soon, new AI-powered features will be available in Google Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into a simple format, so you can quickly get the big picture and discover more thanks to the web.
If we are to believe Cnbcwhich Bard unveiled five days in advance, Google will soon replace the “I’m feeling lucky” button with a new bar where you type potential questions as you would an intelligent chatbot. The answers will be offered in a gray ‘bubble’ which will appear immediately below. In addition, questions to be asked will be recommended, useful for deepening the subject, in order to continue the research.