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Everything About Bard, Google’s Answer to ChatGPT, Simplified for You

2023-02-08 , 2:11 pm

It seems like Google isn’t ready to share its dominant market power just yet, for the multinational tech company has just announced the launch of Bard to rival ChatGPT.

Here’s what you need to know about Bard.

About Bard

On 6 February, Google CEO, Sundar Pichai, announced on his blog that the software will be in the hands of “trusted testers” and would be “more widely available to the public in the coming weeks.”

Bard is said to be a “lightweight” version of LaMDA and “seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models.”

LaMDA, which stands for Language Model for Dialogue Applications, is a family of conversational neural language models developed by Google. It’s kind of like ChatGPT, and it’s the AI chatbot that got into the news when an engineer said that the chatbot had become “sentient”.

As it uses less power than LaMDA, more users can use it at any one time.

Also, Bard will be powered by LaMDA.

So what is ChatGPT then?

If you didn’t know what ChatGPT is, I don’t know where you’ve been.

But well, maybe ChatGPT will know.

ChatGPT is an advanced chatbot which communicates in a conversational tone. The functions of ChatGPT includes answering follow-up questions, challenging incorrect premises, rejecting inappropriate requests and even admitting its mistakes.

The software can even generate texts upon requests such as reports, songs and even essays.

In other words, it’s like a friend who’s super smart—so smart, it can even pass exams from top business or law schools.

But…how does it compare to Bard?

Bard vs ChatGPT

Pichai mentioned that Bard “draws on information from the web” which implies that the software might be able to solve ChatGPT’s limitations of not being able to address queries on current happenings.

After all, Bard has the backing of Google and its crawlers that are always crawling the Internet.

In addition, Bard “requires significantly less computing power” which might solve the problems of ChatGPT’s service errors that occur when too many people are using it (which is like almost always).

However, as Bard has not been implemented yet, we cannot be too sure of its true capabilities.

The “war” has yet to begin.

Benefits of AI Chatbots

You might be wondering: Wait, we already have search engines…why do we still need chatbots?

I mean, just say “Hey Google”, and a Bard-like Google “chatbot” will respond.

Here’s why.

Sundar Pichai shared that “AI-powered features are able to distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats.”

These chatbots would be able to provide insights and different point-of-views for us to consider, as compared to search engines (your “Hey Google” answer) which provide huge amounts of information that might not be targeted to our specific questions.

In other words, it’s smarter and won’t be just answering the questions we pose to them.

No wonder it’s rumoured that it’s gaining sentient.