Google Unveils Bard AI Chat Tool Setting The Stage For A Showdown With ChatGPT

In a rather expected announcement, Google unveils its own AI-driven chatbot solution called "Bard". Between this, ChatGPT, and Microsoft's reported Bing version, among others, the AI-driven chat arena is looking to get quite heated this year.

2/ Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world's knowledge with the power, intelligence, and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses. Today we're opening Bard up to trusted external testers. pic.twitter.com/QPy5BcERd6

— Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) February 6, 2023

Sundar Pichai, CEO of Google and Alphabet, announced Bard in a Google blog post (and on Twitter) yesterday, as an apparent response to the highly popular and controversial ChatGPT. Pichai pitched the experimental Bard as a culmination of its two year old LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) project.

Google was forced into rolling out Bard due to the sudden and widespread adoption of OpenAI's ChatGPT. Such has been the impact and popularity of ChatGPT that, in fact, Mountain View made an emergency call to reenlist help from its founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin.

ChatGPT, especially since its latest November 2022 release, essentially thrust AI-powered chatbot prowess into the limelight. It allowed any regular user to use queries to write Python code, craft music lyrics, generate smart, intelligible essays, and solve text-based mathematic problems, just to name a few. Due to the breadth of its ability and user base, tech companies are struggling to launch their own AI-driven chatbot to cash in on the interweb's latest darling.


Google's Bard is still in experimental stages and is currently opened to "trusted external testers." Pichai declares that, "Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models. It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses."

It's designed to take users a step further beyond a standard Google query. An example given is users are wanting to know more than just, "how many keys does a piano have?" Bard's role is when users require deeper understanding and insights, such as, "is the piano or guitar easier to learn, and how much practice does each need?” 

In other news, Microsoft looks to be releasing its take on a Bing-branded AI-chatbot as well. Rumored for March release, "new Bing" comes after Microsoft announced its 10-year invest plan in ChatGPT's developer OpenAI for a reported sum of $10 billion.