Google has announced that its conversational AI technology will soon be available for the public to use.
The tech giant CEO, Sundar Pichai, said in a statement released on Google’s official blog that Bard, which is the company’s new AI chatbot, is based on its Language Model for Dialogue Applications (LaMDA). Pichai also added that the AI Chatbot will be made available to a select group of trusted testers first, before making it more widely available to the public in coming weeks.
According to Pichai, Google re-focused itself to work on Bard around 6 years ago, stating that the Transformer, which is the most important part of generative AI of today, was created by the company’s researchers in 2017.
“Google AI and DeepMind are advancing the state of the art. Today, the scale of the largest AI computations is doubling every six months, far outpacing Moore’s Law. At the same time, advanced generative AI and large language models are capturing the imaginations of people around the world. In fact, our Transformer research project and our field-defining paper in 2017, as well as our important advances in diffusion models, are now the basis of many of the generative AI applications you’re starting to see today,” Pichai said.
Bard has been programmed to draw information from the web, and provide responses that mirrors that if a conversation. Google said it will release the lightweight version of LaMDA, which requires less computational power, and use it to gather feedback on improving Bard’s responses.
“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. […] We’re releasing it initially with our lightweight model version of LaMDA. This much smaller model requires significantly less computing power, enabling us to scale to more users, allowing for more feedback,” Pichai said.
Google highlights that its AI is capable of serving several accurate responses, especially as the company maintains the most up to date record of web content on the planet. Google said the model is capable of generating an explanation of NASA’s James Webb exploration to a 9 year old. The model can also do other things like event planning, give information about a sportman, compare events and movies, and even synthesize insights for questions where there’s no one right answer.
Bard is not the only AI model Google is working on, it has other models like LaMDA, PaLM, Imagen and MusicLM.