Google said on Monday it will soon release an experimental chatbot called Bard, as it races to respond to ChatGPT, which has wowed millions of people since it launched in late November.
Google said it will begin testing its new chatbot with a small private group on Monday before releasing it to the public in the coming weeks. In a blog post, Google CEO Sundar Pichai also said the company’s search engine will soon have artificial intelligence capabilities that provide summaries of complex information.
Bud — so named because it’s a storyteller — is based on an experimental technology called LaMDA, short for Language Model for Conversational Applications, that Google has tested several times internally, the company said. months and tested with a limited number of outsiders.
Google is one of many companies that has been developing and testing a new type of chatbot that can hold impromptu discussions on almost any topic. OpenAI, a small San Francisco startup, captured the public’s imagination with ChatGPT and kickstarted a race to bring the technology into a broad product.
Chatbots can’t chat exactly like humans, but they often seem to. They generate a wide range of digital texts that can be repurposed in almost any context, including tweets, blog posts, term papers, poems and even computer code.
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The culmination of more than a decade of research by companies like Google, OpenAI, and Meta, chatbots represent a sea change in the way computer software is built, used, and operated. They’re poised to reinvent Internet search engines like Google Search and Microsoft Bing; talking digital assistants like Alexa and Siri; and email programs like Gmail and Outlook.
But the technology has flaws. Because chatbots learn skills by analyzing vast amounts of text posted on the internet, they cannot distinguish fact from fiction and can generate text that is biased against women and people of color.
Google has been reluctant to release such technology to the public because the company’s executives fear the company’s reputation could suffer if the AI produces biased or toxic speech.
When ChatGPT debuted in November and attracted millions of users, Google’s caution began to undercut its edge as a generative AI innovator. In December, Mr. Pichai announced “Code Red,” pulling groups out of their normal tasks to help companies speed up the release of their own AI products.
The company scrambled to catch up, convening its co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin in several meetings to review its product roadmap and lay out a plan to speed up the approval process.
According to the New York Times, Google plans to release more than 20 artificial intelligence products and features this year. The company says its upcoming AI search engine feature will attempt to extract complex information and multiple perspectives to provide users with a more conversational experience.
The company also plans to spread its underlying AI technology through partners so they can build a variety of new applications.
Chatbots like ChatGPT and LaMDA are more expensive to run than typical software. In a recent tweet, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company spends “single-digit cents” per chat on the service. Considering the millions of people using the service, this represents a huge cost to the company.
Google says Bard will be a “lightweight” version of LaMDA, which will allow the company to offer the technology at a lower cost.
