Google finally has an answer to ChatGPT’s wild success.
The company has unveiled a new chatbot called Bard that Google’s Language Model powers for Dialogue Applications (LaMD)A, which leverages troves of data to generate compelling responses to user queries. It is currently being Beta tested and will be made available to the broader public in the coming weeks.
“Bard seeks to combine the breadth of the world’s knowledge with the power, intelligence and creativity of our large language models,” CEO Sundar Pichai said. “It draws on information from the web to provide fresh, high-quality responses.”
“Soon, you’ll see AI-powered features in Search that distill complex information and multiple perspectives into easy-to-digest formats, so you can quickly understand the big picture and learn more from the web,” Pichai wrote, “whether that’s seeking out additional perspectives, like blogs from people who play both piano and guitar, or going deeper on a related topic, like steps to get started as a beginner.”
The launch of the new AI-powered search tool comes at a time when Google sees the rise of ChatGPT as a significant threat to its core search engine product. In just the two months since its launch, users have gone from using ChatGPT to generate essays, lyrics, stories, and email drafts to asking questions they might have previously looked for on Google, according to CNN.
Last month, Microsoft announced it was planning to invest $10 billion in ChatGPT and had plans to integrate the tool into some of its products, possibly its search engine Bing.
Rising competition from ChatGPT recently prompted Google’s management to issue a code red declaration for its search engine business. Last year, Gmail’s founder Paul Buchheit had also reportedly warned that Google’s business might be a year or two away from total disruption due to the rise in the use of AI.