Google has released the public access beta version of its ChatGPT competitor

Google on Tuesday launched the chatbot Bard, a competitor to ChatGPT, into public access, supposedly with the aim of improving the quality of its answers thanks to increased exchanges with users.

The Alphabet Group subsidiary in Catastrophe at the beginning of February announced the creation of Bard, and was overwhelmed by the November arrival of ChatGPT, which was developed by startup OpenAI in collaboration with Microsoft.

Capable of producing emails, messages, or lines of code on a simple request, ChatGPT sparks massive enthusiasm for generative AI.

Use of the Bard was initially restricted to “confidence testers” before it opened to the public on Tuesday. However, the number of connections has been restricted and a queue has been created to manage the request.

Access is currently only available from the US and UK.

“When people start using Cool and testing its capabilities, they will surprise us,” Google chief Sundar Pichai said in a letter to employees seen by AFP.

“Things are going to go wrong. But user feedback is critical to improving the product and underlying technology.”

The Californian group’s leader has been criticized internally for its hasty launch of Bard to catch up with Microsoft.

The interface consists of a website separate from the Google search engine with an area where the user can type in a question.

“The real world”

Asked by AFP what sets it apart from ChatGPT, Bard replied that, unlike its competitor, it is “able to access factual information through a Google search engine.”

The chatbot also noted that “it is still under development while ChatGPT is already available to the general public. This means that I am constantly learning and improving while ChatGPT remains unchanged.”

“We’ve learned a lot from testing the Bard, and the next major step in improving it is getting feedback from more people,” Google vice presidents Sissie Hsiao and Eli Collins wrote in a group post.

“The more people use it, the better the large language models (LLM, a program that can provide answers to questions formulated in everyday language) will be able to predict which answers might be useful,” the authors explain.

Through data feeds and written conversations, the LLM algorithm can more accurately determine the relevant answer to a question.

Bard relies on LaMDA, a language model Google built for creating chatbots, of which a group from Mountain View (California) has unveiled its first version in 2021.

The two Google executives acknowledge that LLM is “not flawless,” and can “provide confirmed information that is inaccurate, misleading, or false.”

Google indicates that it has put in place “safeguards” to contain the potential for inaccurate or inappropriate answers, in particular limiting the length of exchanges in a dialogue between the Bard and the user.

Since the launch of ChatGPT, many netizens have sought to push the chatbot to its limits and generated ridiculous, even alarming responses.

In an interview with The New York Times, Sissie Hsiao and Eli Collins said that Google has yet to define a business model and monetization strategy for Bard.