Google releases its AI service to early testers and announces ChatGPT rival Bard.

Alphabet, the company that owns Google, plans to compete with Microsoft by introducing a chatbot service and more artificial intelligence for its search engine and developers.

IN A BLOG POST ON MONDAY, alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the company is launching a conversational AI service called Bard to gather user feedback before going live to the general public.

According to the blog, LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications), which Google unveiled two years ago, powers Bard, an experimental conversational AI service. According to the CEO, Bard’s capabilities will combine the “power, intelligence, and creativity of the company’s large language models.”

Bard will research using both the information on the web and the responses offered by the users. The business is initially making the AI system and the LaMDA lightweight model version available to testers. The current emphasis is gathering feedback to improve the AI system for future applications.

Google’s Bard is Alphabet’s response to Microsoft-led OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Compared to TikTok and Instagram, ChatGPT has experienced the fastest consumer application growth rate in history. Just two months after its launch, ChatGPT is estimated to have attracted 100 million monthly active users in January.

ChatGPT can produce articles, essays, jokes, and even poetry in a hurry when a user requests it. In late November, Microsoft-supported private company OpenAI made it freely accessible to the general public. Users in the US can now access ChatGPT Plus through the company for a $20 monthly fee (nearly Rs. 1,600).

Google is concentrating on supporting other trustworthy AI systems through the Google Cloud partnerships in addition to Bard. Anthropic, Cohere, and C3.ai are some of these AI systems. Recent reports show that Google has contributed close to $400 million (or roughly Rs. 3,299 crores) to Anthropic.